and rage in front of o ur screen if we were not there stand ing as a survivor, as a neighbour, as a loved

o ne. It is only the immense generosity of everyday people in response to this tragedy that has allowed
hearts to beat again, eased this breaking.
This is the generosity and the spi rit that will reinvent this nation.
What could contrast more deeply with the wizened and shrivelled souls of those now in power?
Those who made such death and devastation possible through budget cuts year after year, those who
3 did not just ignore years of articulate and well -informed tenant complaints and protests but actively
worked to silence them, those who sat o n safety reports without act ing, those who cut corners and
chose the cheapest possible option. They give us only defensiveness now, ducking all responsibility.
Instead of supporting Grenfell's tenants, they show fear of them. They claim the lives of our people a re
A Place to Call Home worth less than sprinklers. They can only think to split this grieving comm unity up, ship them out or
let others take care of them on couches and floors. There is no heart in them to acknowledge o ur
Andrea Gibbons responsibility to take care of each other. There is no heart.
They are Thatcher's brood, still extracting blood money, still trying to bolster up their lucrative
(un)truth that there is no such thing as society. Papering over the reality that it is their murderous
greed that has brought us here.
There is so much to say abou t a system that increasingly treats housing as a means to accumulate
A place to call home. A simple thing. Labour o nce had a vision that there should be ho using fo r capital, never as a home. A creeping worldview that only understands the value of ho using as a
everyone, though what makes a home is perhaps not so simple. As Kim Dovey writes, home is deeply commodity, as somethi ng to be bought and sold, speculated in, land banked. To them, where you Jive
intertwined with our identity. It centres the relationship between ourselves and the earth, centres our is only a piece of property subject to global markets, real estate whose value is tied to locatio n and
connection to community and culture and society, to our past with its memories, and to our ability to status rather than its conditions, the wellbeing or stability of its tenants, its impact on the neighbour-
grow into our full potential with the power to define our future. A home shou ld be a place of strengt h hood. By this system, boarded up and empty houses with front yards full of weeds are somehow worth
and safety. more than deeply-loved homes that have witnessed the joy and pain of generations and yield harvests,
A home should not be what kills us. o r seasons of flowers.
Yet Grenfell went up in fl ames, went up in a great stench and acrid smoking to consume its After WWII, council housing was scattered across the city in the belief that mixed neighbou rhoods
survivors' past and their present, their safety and security and community. It greed ily consumed a still worked best, that social cohesion was important to o ur greater good and happiness. As inflated housing
unknown, possibly never-to-be- known, number of human beings who trusted it and built their lives markets and their related financial instruments become the primary drivers of o ur bubble economy,
within its walls. Each of them was a world of stories and dreams and laughter. On ly memories and we increasingly face once again the vile beliefs that money should ensu re you do not share a hallway
ashes now, a gaping hole in the hearts and lives of those who loved them. or even a street with people of less wealth . That money is its own social good, justifyi ng empty homes
In horror and despair we watched it all, a white flag being waved, cries for help, people staring at while people are homeless, a surfeit ofluxury homes while everyone else crams themselves into shared
us through the windows until slowly all movement ceased. We cried with despe ration and anguish flats and ever-more constrained lives. W hat remains of social housing is portrayed now as anomalous,
strange, frightening. A place to warehouse the most vulnerable, considered as disposable as the d reams
of earlier generations that a better world was possible, until both can be pushed out of sight and out of lists for social housing. Turns out that being part of Generation Rent is the luckiest prospect. The good
mind. In the meantime, they cut the funding for such housing to the very bones, knowing its decay fortune of sharing a flat with strangers for all of your days, or of short- term tenancies with no protection
will only hasten the calls for its disappearance. against rent raises or evictions, or of always living cramped into a few rooms with your parents and
Grenfell represents what Rob Nixon calls spectacular violence, a flaming inferno brought about by your children. After all, you could be on the street.
this worldview with its austerity, deregulation and crisis. ' But it is founded on the slow violence of Those who most deserve society's compassion and care remain caught in the crosshairs of rich
day-to-day neglect of the social infrastructure that belongs to all of us as the heritage of earlier struggle. politicians' hatred. Austerity has meant benefit caps that cause untold misery and ensure more and
The slow violence of disrespect and utter disregard for life shown to the residents of social housing. more people can no longer afford rapidly rising rents. They cut off the younger generation almost
Ben Okri writes: entirely. The bedroom tax ensures that kids will grow up without being able to visit parents when they
separate, that carers can no longer stay over when those who are old and sick are in need, that
their deaths happened long grandparents can no longer care for grandchildren. Punitive cuts to 'disability' along with Work
Before. It happened in the minds ofpeople who never saw Capacity Assessments devastate lives. Funding (and Labour's previous lack of spine) forced the shutting
1/wm. It happened in the profit margins. It happened down and selling off of libraries and community centres and local colleges where people socialised,
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made. 2 found warmth, fed the mind and the imagination. They forced the closing of women's centres and
refuges and emergency shelters, where people found safety. Death and damage everywhere, we already
Slow violence is the more deep-rooted, though it somehow seems invisible to those who have never stand in ruins.
been poor. It is a violence faced in the hard choices between what to buy and what to do without, These are the days of gross inequality and the criminalisation of poverty, days of newspapers
because paying rent leaves so little. The daily anxiety about work, debt, judgement, punitive welfare hawking a hatred and fear of poor people, working people, people of colour no matter how many
regimes, environmental injustices, discrimination. The isolation. The depression caused by dingy walls generations they have lived here, people who have immigrated here no matter what dreams they bring
and building neglect and oppressive rules that assume that poor people need controlling. The lack of with them or what UK-funded and armed war they are fleeing. We are losing in the Tory government's
time for family, the inability to provide for them. The sickness. The cold and the damp. The lack of epic battle to redistribute money from the poor to give to the rich.
power to change fortune or surroundings. The day in day out surviving when life should be so much But this election may have been the beginning of change. We watch to see what comes of this time,
more. It eats at health, sickens the spirit, destroys just as surely as fire. Death by a thousand cuts, this whether this shaky coalition can stand, what a new election will bring. Labour's manifesto changed
violence makes us old before our time and explodes between us instead of upwards when there is no the game when it was leaked, inspired people, brought hope back into these tired and weak politics
hope that resistance can create a change. that engraved meaningless words on stones to battle a ravenous politics of asset-stripping at any cost.
What will happen now if our growing resistance does not create change? The housing policies of As Jonathan Pye said before he started singing, New Labour is dead. It is so exciting to think where
the Tory government will inflict ever-deeper violence of both kinds on the most vulnerable, shored up we could go from here.
by moralising around cheap ideas of self-help and responsibility. On June 24 a Guardian headline said The massive building of council houses, the removal of restrictions on councils building, the
it all in quoting a new report from Shelter: 'Housing crisis threatens a million families with eviction regu lation of the private rented sector to secure tenancies and restrain rent raises and ensure adequate
by 2020'. There is little that is 'new' in this new housing crisis, just new depths to the cuts to benefits conditions, housing first provision for rough sleepers, a reversal of benefit sanctions and caps, a change
already cut to the bone, new breadth to their reach to tear away basic necessities from more and more to a planning framework that guarantees obscene profits to developers and so much more ... the
people. We are watching a car crash in slow motion. Rough sleeping has already doubled since the holistic nature of the proposed changes is inspiring. It begins to undercut the idea of housing as
Tories took power; it is already more than councils can handle as hundreds of thousands wait years on something to generate maximum profits, housing as a commodity.
 I wou ld hope, though, that we start there only to aim higher, to do better. That we think about how
to make of housing not a commodity nor just a shelter, but a home. That we think of how that process
happens, how we are able to take space and make it our own as households, and more collect ively in
our buildings or estates or neighbourhoods. That we take seriously how home nurtures our selves and
our futures. That we look at sweat equity, self-build, cooperatives and land trusts. That we open up all
of our unused and unloved spaces to transformation for permanent benefit to the community. That
we think about how sustainability connects to the wealth of local and natural materials that could be
used to ret rofit and build or the integration with green space and gardens or the green jobs that could
be created. That we think about how we each connect to our home and through it to a vibrant hybrid
culture and to a broad and welcoming community where we can grow old gracefully while space
remains for our ch ildren and then their child ren. Ownership is not necessarily needed for any of this,
rather secure tenancies and management structures that grant the ability to shape our spaces according
to our needs and our desires, to try new thi ngs and fail and try again, to build and paint and transform.
It sounds utopian until you remember we are conditioned to think of housing as assets to be managed,
not spaces that should support our passions and our dreams. Knitted into com munities, they shou ld
redefine sustainability and living well upon the earth. Examples shine all over this country, and many
more across the world.
We know how to do th is.
Instead we live under a logic that justifi es buildings boarded up and left to fa ll apa rt , investment
fl ats bu ilt to sit empty, while crisis rages and people have to choose between housing that they cannot
afford, housing that is dangerous and cou ld kill them, and no housing al all. Yet it is not just our
housing, but the manner of our occupying it that needs rethinking. The relearning of democracy and
the opening to creativity in creating a home and a new environment is the hard part. As for paying for
it-is it 11ot a home? Is it a second house, country house, investment house, occasiona l party in London
house? Tax the hell out of it, maybe even make it impossible to own such things altogether until
everyone has a home. A few steps in thinking how our ideas of property should work to support life,
not strip it down and cast it away.
As Ben Okri continued in his poem for Grenfell, 'let a world-changing thought flower'.
 ence. It means asking who and what housi ng is for, who controls it, who it empowers, who it oppresses.
It means questioning the fun ction of housing within globalised neoliberal capitalism.4
However, residential st ruggles today are not simply derivative of other conflicts. Housing
movements are significant political actors in their own right. The housing question may not be
resolvable under capitalism. But the shape of the housing system can be acted upon, modified, and
changed.
4 The social theorist Henri Lefebvre helps us understand the political role of housing and the
potential for changing it. In his 1968 book Tlie Right to the City, Lefebvre argued that industrial
insurrection was not the only force fo r social transformation. An "urban strategy" fo r revolut ionizing
society was possible.5 Given changes to the nature of work and of urban development, the industrial
The Residential Is Political proletariat was no longer the only agent of revolutionary change, or even the predominant one.
Lefebvre claimed that there was a new political subject: the city dwelle r. More generally, Lefebvre
David Madden and Peter Marcuse invokes the politics of"the inhabitant," a category that includes any worker, i.n the broadest sense, seen
6
from the perspective of everyday social and residential life.
Lefebvre is vague about what exactly the inhabitant as a political subject will accomplish with the
urban revolution . But he does point to a differen t way of inhabiting. He imagines a fu ture where social
needs would not be subordi nated to economic necessity, where disalienated dwelling space would be
The classic statement on the political -economic aspects of housing was written by Friedrich Engels in universally available, where both equality and difference would be the basic principles of social and
1872. At the time, few disputed the fact that housing conditions for the industrial proletariat were political life.7
unbearable. What Engels called ~the housing question" was the question of why working-class housing Whether or not anything like Lefebvre's urban revolution is on the horizon, we can use his ideas
appeared in the condition as it did, and what should be done about it. to understand a basic point : the polit ics of housing involve a bigger set of actors and interests than is
Engels was generally pessimistic about the prospects for housing struggles per se. Criticising recognised either by mainstream debates or by conventional political-economic analyses such as that
bourgeois attempts at housing reform, he argued that housing problems should be understood as some offered by Engels. In the ort hodox account, the only conflicts that matte r are those surrounding
of "the numerous, smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of exploitation and value. But the ruling class also needs to solidify its rule, and preserving the ability to
production."2 He concluded, "As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly exploit is only one aspect of th is. There are also political, social, and ideological imperat ives that
to hope for an isolated solut ion to the housing question or of any other social question affecting the significantly affect res idential conditions.
fate of the worke rs." 3 For Engels, housing struggles were derivative of class struggle. Housing problems, In the fin ancialized global economy-which was only beginning to emerge when Lefebvre was
then , could only be addressed through social revolution. writing- real estate has come to have new prominence in relation to industrial capital. Housing and
The housing question is embedded within the structures of class society. Posing the housing urban development today a re not secondary phenomena. Rather, they are becoming some of the main
question today means uncovering the connections between societal power and the residential experi- processes driving contemporary global capitalism. If Lefebvre is right, housing is becoming an ever
more important site for the reproduction of the system-a change that might open new strategic
possibilities fo r housing movements to achieve social change.
 Housing is a right! 11 Banners proclaim "HOUSING JS A RIGHT NOT A PRIVILEGE." Organisers with
groups like the Right to the City Alliance draw upon claims about human rights as a viable legal
The language of rights has an ambiguous political track record. Rights can be used for a huge variety strategy against housing injustice. 10 Opponents of gent rification often end up relying on some version
11
of purposes, some of wh ich are emancipatory and some of which are oppressive. Critics link the of housing researcher Chester Hartman's idea that there should be a "right to stay put."
discourse of rights to imperialism and colonial civilizing projects. Or they see rights as more symbolic A radical right to housing is a special kind of right. It links to the radical conception of rights
than substantive. For some critics, declarations of rights too often amount to ineffective and unen- invoked by the phrase ''the right to the cit( originally popularized by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 and
forceable claims, o r, even worse, to toothless abstractions that just help unequal societies feel better subsequently made the basis for social movements around the world. 12 From Lefebvre's perspective,
about their inequality. When the relatively powerless claim rights against the powerful, legal fo rmulas the right to the city is a "cry and a demand"; that is, part of social struggle, not an individual legal
run up against the reality of class hierarchy and domination : "between equal rights fo rce decides...a entitlement. 13 "Right" is not used in its conventional legal sense, but in an ethical and political sense.
9
Claims about legal equality, crit ics argue, only serve to disguise the truth of actual inequality. Lefebvre is not proposing a right to the city as it currently exists, but the right to a transformed city,
When used in a purely legal sense, rights can functi on lo shore up existing st ructures and and the right to transform it. Such a right is not opposed to legally enforceable claims, but it aims at
relationships without questioning them. If the right to housing is merely a right to be incorporated social and political goals that are far broader than that.
into the residential status quo, without changing present methods of distributing the benefi ts and costs A truly radical right to housing must comprise a similarly expansive set of polit ical demands. More
of housing, then it is a weak right indeed. Such a right would remain silent about the social conflicts than a simple legal claim , a real right to housing needs to take the form of an ongoing effort to
al the heart of housing politics. The vast bulk of the legal edifice that shapes access to housing exists to democratise and decommodify housing, and end the alienation that the existing housing system
protect the rights of property owners. A right to housing that does not challenge and change the engenders. It would name a set of claims about the housing that everyone in fa ct deserves, claims
current housing system would either be unenforceable or at best end up as a state subsidy fo r landlords. legitimized not only by legal mechanisms bu t also by popular democratic mobilization . It would not
A legalistic, procedural version of the right to housing is bound to foll short of the result s that it be a demand for inclusion wit hin th e horizon of housing politics as usual but an effort to move that
promises. horizon.
Wh ile arguments criticisi ng rights should be taken seriously, they arc not grou nds for dismissing There are many routes towards decornrnodification. These include more and better public housing,
the entire repertoire of rights-based housing politics. The universe of rights is not monolithic. Not all rent controls, more secure tenancies, public ownership ofland, public financing, limits on speculation,
versions of rights end up maintaining the status quo. Under some conditions, rights talk can be a way and the adoption or re- introduction of regulations on home finance mechanisms. The most obvious
to demand the impossible. The mere act of trying to claim a right that is unreasonable under the opportu nity for action would be to immediately halt and throw into reverse the processes of deregu-
current state of affairs can illust rate the limits of the system and point towards ways to change it. lation and privatisation that are steadily exacerbating the housing crisis.
An actual right to housing necessarily implies fundamental challenges to the existing system. The The housing system needs to make the interests of inhabitants the dominant concern of housing
efficacy of this sort of right is that it can articulate a demand around which a mass movement can policy. Currently, investors and owners rule the housing system. When conflicts arise, their needs are
mobilize: the demand for truly decent housing for all irrespective of one's economic or social status. met and their interests are protected . This must change. The housing system should be reconfigured
Across the world, social movements demonstrate that making such a demand can be a route towards to privilege the people who live in housing, rather than those who only profit from it.
housing justice. And in the absence of such rights, housing is abandoned to the political and economic Housing needs to be opened up to broader democratic scrutiny and input. Currently, the contours
vicissitudes of class society and market provision. of the housing system are determined by a relatively small elite. As a result, the scale of inequality and
In fact, the pursuit of a right to housing is today already a major objective fo r activists. Virtually injustice in the housing system is not widely acknowledged. We need to create new sites where the
every housing protest is suffused with rights talk. Crowds at demonstrations chant "Fight, fight , fi ght! housing question can be reopened.
 People do not only live in homes. They live in neighbourhoods and communities. They occupy
buildings but also locations in a social fab ric. A rad ical right to housing must affirm and protect this
web of relations. It must propose new li nks between housing and other domains. As Raquel Rolnik,
the former UN special rapporteur on housing, argues, "the notion of the human right to adequate
housing is not rest ricted to the access of the house itself ... the right to housing has to be apprehended
in a much broader context." 14 A radical right to housing raises our sights and sees the objective of
action more comprehensively, tying together in a common quest broader claims to equality, dignity,
solidarity, and welfare.

lf a right to housing means anything, it must be th e name of a movement to democratise, decommod ify,
and disalienate the housing system. The right to housing names a direction, not a solution. The only
solution is to struggle to make that right a reality.
Addressing residential injustice and inequality will require state action as well as large-scale popular
mobiliz.ation. Establishing a radical right to housing goes beyond the universal provision of dwelling
units. A radical right to housing requires radical social change. But a world where decent housing is
provided to all is possible. It requires confronting the housing question without illusions and changing
the systems that, generation after generation, produce residential and social crisis. The contemporary
world already possesses the technical capaci ty and material resources to solve the housing problem.
The question is whether all of those bad ly served by the present system ca n unite and marshal the
power to implement a tru ly humane system, one that does not see housing as real estate but as homes
as a matter of right for all.
 repeating global struggles with finance capital, pointing to cycles of dispossession from the nineteenth
century to the present day; the slum clearance, demolition and displacement of communities in
Haussman's Paris in the 19th century, Robert Moses in 20th century New York and contemporary
1
development in cities like Seou l, Delhi and Mumbai. The flood of global capital into London and the
destruction of hundreds of housing estates to make way for luxury apartments in their place is the
latest- and for us in London particularly extreme-evocation of that struggle with finance capital.

5 As capital floods into pro perty in London-and other British, North American and European
cities- property values are losing all connection with local needs, breaking the link between supply
and demand in the housing market. Because property is now the global investment of choice, prices
are so skewed to the demands of foreign investors that this could be termed a 'super prime' crisis. The
Who Is the City For? sub-prime crisis in the US, which triggered the 2008 financial crash, saw the frenz ied trading of cred it
default swaps and coUateralized debt o bligations in very high risk mortgages break the relationship
Anna Minton with people on the ground who were in no position to afford those mortgages.
Today, what economists call the 'exchange value' of housing in London, and other cities, has entirely
broken the connection with its 'use value'; exchange value is the price of a commodi ty sold on the
market while its use value is its usefulness to people. When it comes to housing, prices are failing to
respond to the needs of most people, allowing the influx of global capital, often from highly dubious
Some years ago, before I had heard of Henri Lefebvre's 1968 book La Droil a la Ville, I was approached sources, to utterly distort the market and creating a crisis of affordability affecting all layers of society.2
by Ben Tunstall, a London based activist, to help set up a 'Right to the City' campaign. He had Lefebvre's conception of the Right to the City was based around the everyday experience of people
successfully fought the demolition of Brixton's indoor market that gained listed status and was aware inhabiting the city, emphasising use value over exchange value. 3 He believed that city space is contested
of Lefebvre's ideas and the dissemination of the Right to the City concept into NGO/UN-type circles. and the struggle for social, political and economic rights is played out in urban space. Today, in almost
The plan was to bring together activists, journalists and academics in an umbrella group to tackle the every city in the world, the property rights of owners trump the use rights of inhabitants and exchange
range of issues related to gentrification. It was an ambitious project in the shadow of the Occupy value, wh ich views the spaces of the city primarily as places for investment, is dominant. In this context,
movement-at one point standing candidates at elections was discussed and an engaging logo of little the Right to the City becomes a struggle to increase the rights of the inhabitants of the city against the
tents in the city was created. property rights of owners~ and this is undoubtedly why so many politicians are wary of the term.
At the first big meeting of activists and academics it quickly became clear we had stumbled into a Currently, there are a plethora of Right to the City groups around the world, who have more far
minefield. Was the Right to the City a rights-based discourse? Was it too academic to mean anything successfully pulled together what we were trying to do with ou r fledgling campaign. Among the best
to activists fighting battles on the ground? How would we organise ourselves? Who would fund us? As known is the Right to the City Alliance in the US, which focuses on gentrification , aiming to halt the
with many well-intentioned initiatives it soon fell apart, with no funding or paid e mployee to run it. displacement of people o n lower incomes and marginalised communities. In Brazil, organisations in
Even though I wasn't then fully aware of the intellectual heritage of the term, it immediately the favelas of large cities advocated for a Right to the City for slum dwellers and the Right to the City
appealed to me; as David Harvey wrote in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis, it acts as 'bo th is now codified in a national law in Brazil and Ecuador. In recent years UN·HABITAT and UNESCO have
working slogan and political ideal'. Harvey also referred to the relevance of the idea to the multiple, led an effort to include the right to the city as part of a broader agenda for human rights.
 In 201 6, the concept was included for the first time in the UN's New Urban Agenda, the UN's new
20-year urbanisation strategy agreed in Quito, in Ecuador. This has enshrined the 'Right to the Ci ty'
vision in the legislation, political declarations and charters of national and local governments. This
was fa r from easy to achieve and followed very lengthy wrangling between national governments and
civil society groups which came together under an advocacy platform called 'Global Platform for the
Right to the Citf Although the final wording was not considered perfect it was still seen as a significant
victory for groups battling agai nst gentrification, repossessions, the privatisation of public space and
the criminalisat ion of homelessness.
It's not the fi rst time the concept has found favo ur with international fo rums with the World Social
Forum producing a 2004 World Charter on the Right to the City, while 'Right to the City' was also the
theme of the 2010 UN World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro. While ir's not yet taken on the ubiquity
of terms such as sustainability- rendered meaningless through co-opting and ove ruse-academics
fear that the frequency with which it's bei ng used is creating "conceptual bloating":5
Returning to Lefebvre's original conception of contestation and emphasising the connection with
use value over exchange value is one way of guarding against this. His intended definition was that the
Right to the City be a contested te rm wh ich takes on established property rights which means it will
always tread a fine line between being ignored or thrown out by governments, gaining institutional
legitimacy or finally being co-opted. Placi ng the term in the legislat ive frameworks of local and national
governments is not going to solve the crises around the Right to the City age nda but it does at least
add a legi slative lever for civil society groups to work with at a time when they need all the help they
can get.
When Lefebvre published La Droit a la Ville in 1967 most of the West was in the throes of transition
from an industrial to post industrial economy and industrial production was still of paramount
importance. Today, in the post-indust ri al West the new economy of financia l services indust ries has
merged in unholy alliance with a property economy based on speculation and debt and the canvas for
this real estate casino economy is urban space. ln this context this is an idea whose time has come,
with the Right to the City standing fo r democratic cit izensh ip against the steamroller of private
property in the city. As such it is arguably even more important than when Lefebvre coined it.
 In 2012, the Guardian ran a campaign to crowdsource data about Pops in Britain. The project,
though inconclusive in some senses because of people's confusion about what was public, also suggested
a clear pattern. Having begun to be built in the 1980s, Pops around the country increased steadily in
number through the 2000s, and also grew in size. This includes, for example, the estate of More
London, a 13-acre expanse stretching down the Thames's Southbank. The development was completed
in 2003 and sold off in 20 13 to Kuwaiti property company St Martins for £1.7bn, in one of the largest
6 commercial property deals in British history.
In the process, the transformation of the area outside City Hall into a Pops meant that it was no
longer possible to protest outside the headquarters of the mayor and the Greater London Authority
(GLA). Or to take photos, apparently: when I was filming with Channel 4 there in 20 15, we were swiftly
Squares for Sale! Cashing Out on removed from the property. This is nothing new. In 20 10, during a London Assembly planning and
housing committee meeting, Jenny Jones, from The Green Party, said: 'It has taken us eight years to
negotiate with More London so that we politicians can do a TV interview outside our own building.'
Public Space If these land deals matter so much, why isn't more of a fuss made about them? Well, more sedentary
Bradley L. Garrett generations of the past may have had a heightened sensitivity to change. If you have lived in an area
for 20 years and used a public space in particular ways, you are certain to notice when your rights to
that space change. It is also likely that politicians of the past may also have been less prone to prey on
the increasing (voluntary and involuntary) nomadism of younger generations. While our more itiner-
ant lifestyles today have clear benefits in terms of breadth of spatial knowledge, we often lose sight of
The geographer David Harvey once wrote that 'the freedom to make and remake our cities and the local. In the short term, this can lead to alienation, loneliness and feelings of disconnection and
ourselves is ... one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights'. Generations of urban apathy. In the long term, it assures that our children will be more likely to play FIFA inside VR headsets
theorists, from Lewis Mumford to Jane Jacobs to Doreen Massey, have suggested that the place where than to kick a ball around outside because place, for them, will be cleaved from geography.
cities get 'remade' is in the public rather than private sphere. It is for this reason, above all others, we Despite multiple objections from politicians and notwithstanding Boris Johnson's 2011 'Manifesto
should sense crisis where public space is under threat from privatisation and securitisation. for Public Space', the construction of Pops such as More London is continuing to escalate and expand.
London, like many cities around the world, is being reshaped by the creation of privately owned This includes nine acres planned in Tower Hamlets, a vast patch outside the Battersea Power Station
public spaces ('Pops'). These legal niceties transform open-air squares, gardens and parks into spaces development, and open space and parks at Woodberry Down near Manor House, where I was recently
that look public but are not- they are owned and/or managed by private entities. And as a result, the chased around for taking photos. The largest Pops in the city, according to data I have been compiling
rights of the citizens using them- our rights to the city itself- are curtailed, since private whims rather with Guardian Cities, is of course the 2012 Olympic site, which will come as no surprise to those who
than the law of the land may then shape the rules of engagement. claimed long ago that the real 'legacy' of the games would be one of hyper-gentrification. These out-
Although this issue might be academic while we're eating our lunch on a private park bench, the sourced and sub-contracted games, with their aggressive compulsory-purchasing mechanisms, were a
consequences of multiplying and expanding Pops affects everything from our personal psyche to our perfect catalyst for the privatisation of public space.
ability to protest.
 Given how all these developments seem to contradict stated city authority goals to increase Geographer Don Mitchell suggests that what public space provides in a city more generally under
publicly-owned public space, one could be forgiven for thinking that the GLA is not actually in control surveillance are small islands of freedom surrounded by Foucault's 'carceral archipelago' - the surveilled
of development in London. And it's no wonder- under both the Conservatives and New Labour, city. Herein lies a crucial question: what happens when our small islands of freedom - our public
there's been no resistance to privatisation, despite community dismay and reams of research clearly spaces- become indistinguishable from the rest of the city? Will we be reduced to having our tiny
documenting the negative effects of such sell-offs. shared bedrooms as our only remaining islands of freedom in an overpriced, post-public city?
So what do we expect to happen in public space that makes it so crucial it remains free and open Sociologist Richard Sennett suggests that private public spaces are 'dead public spaces' because the
to diverse people and activities? In 2008, geographer Ash Amin wrote that 'public spaces marked by essence of conviviality, spontaneity, encounter and yes, that little sprinkle of chaos, have been stripped
the unfettered circulation of bodies [produce] new rhythms from the many relational possibilities'. out. The spaces are not rendered dead because they aren't enjoyable- many of us still look forward to
Conversely, when space is controlled, and especially when the public is unclear about what the legal lounging on the steps near the canal at Granary Square in the sun- but dead because the potential
or acceptable boundaries of activity are, we tend to police ourselves, to monitor our behaviour and to range of spatial engagement here can fit in a coffee cup.
limit our interactions, especially after embarrassing confrontations with security forces. The power for corporate entities to not only impede certain activities but to bar the public access
Property owners are perfectly aware of this and prey on those sensibilities. The new King's Cross to 'public' space was upheld during the Occupy protest court proceedings. On 14 October 2011, an
development at Granary Square is one of the largest open-air spaces in Europe- about the same size injunction passed 'preventing persons unknown entering or remaining in or trespassing on [Paternos-
as Trafalgar Square. Unlike Trafalgar Square, it is also a Pops. Photographer Nicholas Goodden set up ter Square]'. While Occupy may seem like ancient history, these proceedings were important because
a tripod there recently to take a photo, and was immediately asked by security whether he had a permit they set a precedent: protest would not be tolerated in open-air private space. It follows that what is at
to do so. When he said he did not, he was ordered to move across the canal to get his image. In other stake here is more than a lost ability to play ball games, take photos and drink street beers; what is
words, he was kicked out of 'public' space. This would not have happened to a photojournalist in being lost is our right to the city.
Trafalgar Square, which is owned by the Crown and managed by the Greater London Authority. At a TEDx event where I spoke about public space in London, I suggested that the moment for
In 2016, I returned to the Granary Square with RT News to see how long it took to provoke a direct action against the loss of public space was upon us. We needed an urban action that would echo
confrontation with security by doing a walking interview across the square. The answer was about two the mass trespass of Kinder Scout by the Rambler's Association in 1932, described by Lord Roy
minutes. A guard with a wry smile, told us, on camera, that Broadgate Estates 'owns everything, Hattersley as 'the most successful direct action in British history'. Taking action by finding and using
including the public towpath, and wants us to leave'. So much for a 'public realm'. public space sidesteps the thorny, and frankly depressing, issue of what has been lost. Instead, it focuses
Property owners know that moments like this are embarrassing for the public and encourage on what we can do.
security to make these encounters as awkward as possible so that the 'offender' will comply out of And so, on a drippy February 2016 morning in Potters Fields Park next to City Hall, excited chatter
shame. They know that conflicts with what appears to be a figure of authority (often dressed like a floated from a large crowd. The hundred-strong group, led by writer Anna Minton and myself, had
police officer) may make you wary and cause you to confine your behaviour within a narrower range amassed to undertake 'Space Probe Alpha'- a mass trespass onto the property of More London.
so as to avoid confrontation in the future. The psychological effects of this sort of self-policing were A few yards from us, thousands of methodically interlaced flame-textured Irish blue limestone
written about by Michel Foucault: 'He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, paving stones marked the socio-political boundary where the public space of the council-owned park
assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; transformed into privately owned pseudo-public space.
he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes Just after noon, fuelled by caffeine and adrenaline, the crowd of more than 100 surged over the
the principle of his own subjection.' paving stones, flanked by two sympathetic metropolitan police officers and a scattering of vexed More
London security personal in emblazoned lapis ponchos. We converged on The Scoop, a private outdoor
arena in view of Tower Bridge, proclaimed it a public agora, and held an unsanctioned two-hour event council passed a PSPO that prohibits people under the age of 21 from entering a specific tower block,
featuring speeches by leading Green Party members Jenny Jones and Si.in Berry, Liberal Democrat Foresters Tower. Bassetlaw District Council has created a PSPO that prohibits 'under 16 year olds.
Peer Lord Clement- Jones, artist Will Jennings, guerrilla geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison, comedian gathering in groups of three or more'. Although PSPOs are often broad in spatial scope, they can be
Mark Thomas and writer Will Self, among others. targeted directly at particular groups or activities.
As trespassers huddled to keep warm, Jennings put forward an impassioned argument against E.60 I recently visited Croydon, where the council is considering an extensive PSPO. Peeking over the
million of public investment in the construction of the proposed private 'Garden Bridge' on the South edge of the overpass at George Street and Wellesley Road from a traffic island, I asked Peter Underwood,
Bank. Berry proposed to 'put new rules in the London Plan that means new publicly accessible space a Croydon resident standing for The Green Party in next year's London Assembly elections, if we cou ld
must be governed by local authority bylaws.' Goldsmiths MA student Rosanna Thompson spoke out walk the boundary of the proposed protection order. Looking east toward No. I Croydon, locally
against Thames Water's recent fencing-off of the Nunhead Reservoir in Southeast London, a space that known as the 50p building, and then circling around, he looked back at me and said "how much time
has long been used as a common by locals. Thomas and Self focussed on Public Space Protection did you say you have?"
Orders being put in place across the country that make busking, street drinking, sleeping rough and Ambling to a nearby wayfinding kiosk on the pavement, Underwood drew a line with his finger
even walking dogs without leads criminal offences. Lord Clement-Jones, who spoke out against these over the streets of the map, showing me that the proposed area will cover something like 4km of space
measures in the House of Lords in the week previous, explained, 'We really can't have our local in central Croydon- including not just the epicentre of the West-field and Hammerson redevelopment
authorities and our police services cracking down on our culture; they're ripping the heart out of our that will subsume the existing Whitgift and Centrale shopping centres in 2019, but also the Queen's
town centres and destroying the vibrancy in our local communities.' Gardens, Duppas Hill Park, Wandie Park, Park Hill, a swathe of residential areas ... and {at this point
As the latter speakers suggested, we now have to look even beyond Pops and consider PSPOs, a he tapped the map significantly) the Croydon council building. Underwood explained that, under the
new form of spatial control order being introduced throughout England and Wales that severely limits proposed PSPO, this cou ld mean local people's ability to protest outside the council offices is snatched
citizens' freedoms within the city. away from them.
Since 2015 Public Space Protection Orders, or PSPOs, came into existence under the Anti-social PSPOs are often aimed at the poor and the vulnerable, which is why community groups in Hackney
Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. Similar to the much-derided anti-social behaviour orders fought that order with such vigilance. In Croydon, by contrast, a public engagement exercise appears
{ASBOs), PSPOs allow for broad powers to criminalise behaviour that is not normally criminal. But to have ended without much ado. In fact, the only reason I became aware of it was because Roland
where ASBOs were directed at individuals, PSPOs are geographically defined, making predefined Karthaus, an architect who teaches at the University of East London {UEL), had been working with
activities within a mapped area prosecutable. PSPOs are being applied primarily to public spaces and, Peter Bradley from the Speakers' Corner Trust to explore the possibility of creating a new speakers'
as Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club writes, the 2014 guidance 'places minimal restrictions on the corner as part of the Croydon redevelopment.
uses of PSPOs, leaving it open for these powers to be targeted against public activities that are merely Bradley told me the council had initially been enthusiastic and supportive about the idea, and also
considered unusual or unpopular, or with which the council disagrees'. generally about retaining public space on North End, Croydon's high street. However, after the council
We have already seen one PSPO battle in Hackney, where the council attempted to make rough began negotiations with the Westfield and Hammerson redevelopment team, it seemed to become
sleeping a criminal offence within a designated area. Under pressure from local groups, and served more anxious about both.
with an 80,000-signature petition, the council withdrew the proposal in June 2016. Dover District Karthaus explained that 'the simple principle of a speakers' corner is that a member of the public
Council created a PSPO in July requiring that dogs be kept on leads under threat of criminal prosecution. may take up the opportunity to do or say whatever they wish, offensive or otherwise, providing it is
In Kensington and Chelsea, consultation is ongoing on an order that would make driving loud cars an within the law'. This may conflict with Croydon's proposed PSPO, which could allow for criminalisation
offence, targeted at rich foreigners cruising the area in Maseratis and Lamborghinis. In Oxford, the of public speech that cou ld be considered "anti-social" or a "nuisance''. But Helen Parrott from Croydon
Council assured me the local authority remains 'supportive of Speakers' Corner' and is 'currently in pushback from Croydon residents about the PSPO. 'It's a fog sweeping in rather than a wall being built
discussion with the trust regarding its proposals for the borough'. right in front of you: he said, 'so it's hard to know at what point to kick off. For now, all we can do is
Given the new development, I wondered whether the proposed protection order was paving the keep trying to raise awareness.'
way for North End to become privatised. Richard Sunderland from Westfield and Hammerson assured Greater public awareness on PSPOs is needed- in part because they effectively outsource policing
me that 'North End will ultimately remain under the council's control and management'. The council to private security, allowing 'an authorised person' to issue fines and initiate prosecution. Furthermore,
also verified this. I then asked Sunderland about the relationship between the redevelopment and the fines can be given out where there may have been a contravention, not where one has definitely taken
PSPO and he told me: 'It's all part of the process of cleaning up the town centre; it's all part of the place; so the process is a bit like a forced plea bargain- if a private security guard, potentially employed
regeneration of Croydon.' by a property developer, thinks you may have violated the PSPO, you must pay the fine or face
Underwood, though, has long suspected the redevelopment triggered the proposed protection prosecution.
order. 'Since they announced the development plans: he said, pointing to a clutch of cranes and Bradley and Karthaus are continuing their discussion with the council about having a speakers'
developer flags flapping over colourful construction hoardings, 'we've been flooded with proposals- corner as part of the North End redevelopment. As Bradley explained: 'Places where people gather
for the PSPO, for rerouting the tram system, for an additional flyover. The whole centre of Croydon have never just been about the exchange of goods and services; they have also been places where beliefs
will be ripped up and rebuilt.' and opinions are traded.'
Underwood has attempted to rally public opposition to the protection order, and observed that If, following the German sociologist Jiirgen Habermas, the public sphere is where individuals can
'the public engagement exercise did not ask residents whether they thought the PSPO was appropriate come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and thus influence political action, then
or necessary, but rather asked them what sorts of behaviours should be included'. introduction of spatial protection orders- like the construction of privately owned public spaces- is
The broad implications of PSPOs for public space are concerning. As Janet Davis of the Ramblers a threat to the public sphere wherever they curtail our ability to do so.
writes, 'we fear that PSPOs make it all too easy for local authorities to restrict access to public spaces'. Regardless of recent political shifts, we have learned over the past 20 years that we cannot and
Anna Minton, author of Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City, takes it should not expect a ramping-down of the privatisation and securitisation of public space in our city.
a step further and suggested that 'PSPOs represent a serious ramping up of the control of public space. What is needed is more research and journalism into what is being lost, and where, and more on-the-
The privatisation of public space brings with it a host of undemocratic controls on access and behaviour ground action similar to Space Probe Alpha that both raises awareness on the issue, rendering
- but PSPOs are at least as concerning, as they are a legislative means of restricting the right to behave transparent the fallacy that this 'security theatre' often is.
freely under the law within city space, regardless of whether it's public or private. I wonder if this All of this is important because public space is more than the empty space between buildings. It's
legislative framework is the next step on from Pops.' also the space where we slow down and relax, the space where we meet friends and family, and the
As was made clear in Hackney, there has been public apprehension about and opposition to these space where we can be sure- whoever we might be- that we have a place. Cities are filled with
protection orders, which are beginning to resemble spatial ASBOs, but that is not slowing their buildings that will deny you entry, but public space is where we shou ld all feel welcome, regardless of
deployment. our differences. Especially in cities where space is precious, public spaces are crucial sanctuaries of
Standing on Croydon's North End between a female street preacher with a portable PA system and equality. In short, public spaces are material monuments to our right to the city.
a guy carving a dog scu lpture out of beach sand on a tarp- both activities that could, in theory, be
criminalised under the proposed PSPO- I asked Underwood why there had not been much of a
 that have, if anything, been revived in recent years as an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive
property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration.
It is against this backdro p that, o n May 26, 201 6, the American Pavilion at the Venice Architecture
Biennalewas dig itally 'squatted' byan activist collective based in Detroit . The collective, Detroit Resists,
installed its own virtual exhibition on the pavilion site which was accessible th rough the LAYAR
augm ented reality smartpho ne app.
7 The occupation superimposed images of protest and resistance over the exist in g exhibition. These
a re images that have been routinely omitted from recent architectural visions of a 'resilie nt' regenerating
Detroit. "This is resistance," as the o rgan isers of the occupation argued, "to mass water shutoffs, mass
foreclosures, mass evictions, unconstrained gentrification and other examples of spatial racism." 2 It
Re-Imagining the Squatted City included the words and images of many city residents such as the late activist and femi nist Grace Lee
Boggs, the poet and writer Tawana Petty, the hip hop collective Raiz Up and the grassroots coalition
Alex Vasudevan Detroit Eviction Defense.
Detroit Resists were responding and, in turn , re-functio ning the offi cial Biennale show. Entitled,
"The Architectural Imagination:• the exhibit ion encom passed a series of "specu lat ive architectural
projects" that have been designed for fo ur diffe rent sites across Detroit: the abandoned Packa rd
Automobile Plant; the Dequindre Cut greenway; an empty lot in the city's Mexicantown; and the
It was the French Marxist philosopher and urbanist, Henri Lefebvre, who fi rst developed the concept derelict 1960 Riverfro nt Post Office. The curators of the exhibition selected twelve "visio nary" American
of "the right to the city" in the late 1960s. Lefebvre's Le droit a la ville was completed in 1967 to architects who were tasked with designing new work that responded to the challenges th at a conspic-
commemo rate the cente nary of the publication of Marx's Capital. The book's title was soon adopted as uously post-industrial city faced in "finding its way to the future:' In their own wo rd s, " it is possible to
a slogan during the events of 1968 and was later popularised by urban social movements across the imagine new scenarios fo r the city through architecture ... architecture has the possibility to catalyse
global North and South . For Lefebvre, the right to the city was never intended as a sim ple legal claim. change:' 3
It points instead to an expansive political project for which the city-and its in habitants- remains a The "Architectu ral Imagination" drew, in this way, o n Detroit's lo ng history as a source of
potent source of pro test and possibility. According to Lefebvre, the r ight to the city is a right to architectural inventiveness. The fi nal designs grew out of a series of conversations between the
inhabitation, appropriation and participation. It is a right to transform t he city accord ing to one's architects, city offi cials a nd local community groups. They pointed, o n the one hand, to the role of
needs and desires. It implies, in the eyes of many, a basic right to ho using a nd infrast ructure. But it a rchitecture as a potent ial regenerative force in Detroit, a city now synonymous with loss be it
also signals the potential reorganisation of the city along m o re collective, socially just and ecologically population, property values, jobs, infrastructure, invest ment, security, o r a sense of 'cityness' itself.~
sustainable lines. The recent history of urban squatting in Europe and North America has shown that, O n the other hand, these are projects-from a vertical garden to a recycling ce ntre, a wood skyscraper
whilst some squatters were certainly familiar with Lefebvre's ideas, many were not. This did not stop to an automated manufacturing hub- that have also been designed to serve as models for other post-
them , however, fro m articulating a right to the city that was also a right to continuously re-claim and ind ustrial cities. At stake here, is an architectural vision that transforms the challenges of austerity,
re- make the urban and challenge what it means to think about and inhabit the city. These are practices endu rance and resilience into new forms of living and working.
 For the Detroit Resists Collective, however, the exhibition did little to ultimately address the "urban with an Urban Homesteading Act which was intended to facilitate the transle r of vacant public housing
11
catastrophe that many of Detroit's residents are currently attempting to survive." TI1is was an exhibition into private ownership and, in so doi ng, provide support for low income residents in the state.
that testified, in thei r eyes, to architecture's "political indifference" to an austerity urban ism that has In Detroit, the provision of housing fo r the city's poor was never implemented. In its place, a smal l
left countless city residents without water and many others searching for an affordable home while group of speculators used the auction of tax-foreclosed properties as a vehicle for volume acquisit ion,
thousands of "blighted" houses are demolished or remain empty, their fo rmer occupanlS evicted in predatory investment, widespread tax avoidance and property dumping. The most dilapidated prop-
the wake of the largest municipal tax foreclosure in U.S. history.s erties were never auctioned and the city was left to manage the "spatial residues" of the state's "market-
And this is to say nothing of the mass dispossession of Detroit's predominantly African American based experimentat ion"-abandoned valueless buildings, deserted vacant lots and largely serviced
population that is itself the culmination of a long history of racialised discrimination, polit ical neighbourhoods. 12
marginalisation and financia l mismanagement. This is, after aU, a city that, between 2000 and 2010, It is ultimately these residues that have come to characterise the deep urban crisis that has fo rced
lost over 25 percent of its population. By 2013, up to forty of the city's 139 square miles were largely many of Detroit's inhabitants to develop new skills of endurance and survival, an array of makeshift
abandoned or empty. Over 90,000 properties were vacant. Detroit averaged 90,000 fi res in 2008 that objects, practices, techniques, and collectives that have tended to exist outside the logics of capitalist
was twice the number of New York, a city eleven times more populous. At the time that the city accumulation. As the members of Detroit Resists as well as other local act ivists and citizens know all
declared bankrupt? in July 2013, it took the police department an average of 58 minutes to respond too well, squatting and other forms of urban informality have played an important role in sustaining
13
to emergency calls. an alternative and deeply fragile city in the face of intense inequality.
Detroit's "zone of abandonment" -a rough 20 mile arc around the city's commercial core-has For the bankers, developers and boosters supporting the Detroit Future City Plan-an ambit ious
often been depicted as a derelict space of"social death and feral empt iness" characterised by "hulking large-scale reimagining and 'right-sizing' of Det roit- these are, in fact , creative 'pioneering' practices
7
indust rial ruins, panora mic urban prairies, and dramatically burned-out or overgrown homes." It is that provide a template for the city's large-scale re-development. The Plan itself calls for the regeneration
not, however, empty. Famil ies and neighbourhoods continue to exist there and it is estimat ed that over of the city's vacant industrial spaces as "live- make" neighbourhoods. Abandoned zones with little
8
88,000 people live in the city's high-vacancy zone. As public infrastructure services and networks "market value" are to be re-purposed, in turn , as ecologically sustainable communities supporting a
disappear or are decommissioned, many have turned to squatting. Some continue to live in their new "blue and green infrastructure" made up of retention ponds, carbon fo rests, urban far ms, and
homes after foreclo sing on them. Others occupy abandoned houses and other vacant bu ildings greenways. 14 Tradit ional public services (public transportat ion, water, sanitat ion, and street lights) will
scheduled for demolition. 9 be withd rawn fro m these zones as a way of'encouraging' their residents to leave.
In the case of Detroit , it would be tempting to see in the city a place that has seemingly fa llen out The Plan's sett ler colonial rhetoric with its urban "pioneers," "wastelands" and "frontiers" has not
of the property regimes and profit-making activities that we have come to associate with contemporary been lost on its many critics for whom it has come to represent "a pern icious reworking of the logic of
15
late capitalism. And yet, while the problems of vacancy and abandonment are often associated with ethical environmentalism, enabling and justifying otherwise controversial dispossessions." The re-
the absence of capital. in Detroit, the opposite holds true. In recent years, the city has become a key purposing of the sometimes inventive, sometimes experimental strategies adopted by many Detroit
site fo r new fo rms of exploitation that have simply "widened the avenues of extractive and predatory residents were, in this way, 'captured' and placed in the service of a market-oriented programme of
16
speculation." 10 Beginning in the late 1990s, a series of bills drafted by the Hudson Institute, a private greening, austerity and gentrification.
free market think tank, were introduced in the Michigan Legislatu re including Public Act 123 (PA More often that not these were practices and strategies, however, that had emerged out of a
123). The act devolved responsibility for tax-foreclosed properties from state to local government. desperate search to meet the most basic of needs-shelter- amidst deep material inequality. As the
Land auctions were mandated and the entire process was shortened to three years. PA 123 was paired geographers Don Mitchell and Nik Heynen remind us, the very question of how it is still possible-or
practically impossible-for ma ny people to inhabit and make a life in cities, the question of the "social need of shelter as part of a process of " realoj o" ("re- housing").'' 4 The occupations known as 'Corra /as"-
and structural constraints on accessing even the most basic materials fo r human survival': was a central after the 17t h-century residential structures-proved popular and led to the fo rmation of a network
25
preoccupation of one of Det roit's most prescient interlocutors, the rad ical (and rad ically ecce ntric) of previously vacant properties.
geographer Bill Bunge. 11 In the late l960s, Bunge, a professor at Wayne State Unive rsity in Detroit, What has been described as the "two faces of occupation in an age of austerity" -respond ing to
collaborated with local Black act ivists to set up the Detroit Geographical Exped ition and Institute people's basic needs and constitut ing an autonomous political force-have also played an important
(DGEI) which drew critical attent ion to the effects of racism, inequality and disinvestment on the city's role in the emergence of one of the largest radical housing movements in Europe, the Pfataforma de A
African-American population. 18 The DGEI offered free college extension courses fo r local inner city fectados porla Hipoteca (PAH, or Platform fo r Mortgage Victims). 26 Set up by local activists in Barcelona
residents and participated in a number of grassroots initfa tives which culminated in the publication in February 2009, one of whom, Ada Colau, would later become mayor of the city, the PAH is a
19
of Fitzgerald, a radical people's geography of the eponymous Detroit neighbourhood. grassroots movement to protect the rights of citizens across Spain who are faci ng expulsion fro m their
It was Bunge who first talked of a "geography of survival" as a way of describing the different spaces homes.
20
and spatial relations that shape how a,rd i11creasi11gly if people are able to live in cities. For squatters The work of the PAH focuses on eviction resistance, the settlement of mortgage debts (known as
in Detroit as well as elsewhere in North America and Europe, this is a geography that has assumed a Daci6n e11 pago or "hand ing back the keys") and the transformation of vacant housing held by fi nancial
certain urgency in recent years. The history of urban squatting has always been closely connected to institutions into affordable social housing (Obra Social campaign). 27 The PAH has adopted a wide ra nge
housing insecu rity and the efforts of ordinary people to secure their own right to housing and the of direct actions techniques that include the squatting of buildings to house homeless fam ilies. Their
basic fun damentals of survival. The Global Financial Crisis has, if anything, created a situation where actions have proved so popular and successfu l that, by 20 15, there were 226 separate PAH chapters
28
even more people are without adequate housing across the Global North. This has led to the re- across Spain, 72 of them in Catalonia.
emergence of rad ical housing movements in Berlin, London , New York and Paris and, in particular, The crisis i11 Spain and the various movements (PAH, 15-M Movement) that emerged to challenge
in cities across Southern Eu rope (Greece, Italy and Spain) where the elementary brut alities of the crisis the neoliberal poli cies ad opted by successive Spanish governments also brought new life to a well-
21
have fo rced thousands of people out of their homes. established squatters' scene in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. Many squatter activists detected a
In Spai n, t he housing crisis has been especially acute. Since 2008, foreclosures have skyrocketed. d ose affinity between the new sel f-ma naged camps and the longstand ing social centres t hat they were
Between 2008-20 12, over 400,000 evictions took place. By some estimates, somewhere between 5 and connected to (this included spaces such as Patio Maravillas, Casablanca and Tabacalera in Madrid and
6 million housing units sit empty across the country, roughly 20 percent of the country's housing La Rimaia, Can Masdeu and Barrilonia in Barcelona) .29 They gave material support and advice to the
stock. 12 Spanish mortgage laws requ ire debtors to repay their loans in fu ll even aft er they have declared open-air occupations that they saw as an ersatz fo rm of squatting that was, in turn , responsible fo r the
30
bankruptcy and their homes have been repossessed. production of a "temporary sel f-made city."
While there has been a squatt ing movement (movimiento okupa) in Spain for many decades, recent It is against this backdrop that squatt ing was quickly adopted by a new generation of activists in
years have seen a resurgence of squatting and other forms of occupation that have carved out a broad the 15-M movement fo r whom the right to affordable housing had become the key source of their
geography of survival that "speaks to the reproduction of precarious communit ies, to a new strategy struggles. This led to a large wave of occupations in the summer of 2011 as many local residents in
of people simply and straightforwardly seizing what they need to survive while simultaneously cities such as Madrid turned to undetected forms of stealth squatting as a means to meet immediate
attacking the system that ensu res their precarity."23 This includes the actions of a number of evicted housing needs. They were often supported by former squatters as well as 15-M activists. At the same
fami lies living in and around the city of Seville who joined fo rces with activists who had emerged out
of the neighbourhood assemblies of the 15-M Movement (15th of May Movement). In 20 12, they
occupied a nu mber of empty apartment buildings and began to fi ll the m with people who were in
time, other public and collective squats were also established though many have since been evicted. also taking in place in France and Germany where refugees have set up their own protest camps and
Most acted as community social centres, others served exclusively as dwellings. Some combined the squats to defend their right to work and education while seeking access to decent affordable accom-
two. 3 1 modation and emergency health care. 38
While the 15-M movement helped to rejuvenate the squatter movement in Spain, it also extended The various occupations undertaken by squatters, housing activists, refugees and other migrants
another front in a wider geography of survival, in this case the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe which point, in this way, to the articulation of an alternative right to the city. This is a right, as Henri Lefebvre
has transformed its cities into spaces of containment, exclusion and policing, on the one hand, as well reminds us, to "habitat and to inhabit" (a /'habitat et a /'habiter) . It is in other words, a right to a place
as sites of care, refuge and hospitality on the other. to make a life ("habitat") as well as a right to make that place one's own ("to inhabit") and express a
Refugee and migrant solidarity has long played an important role within various squatter basic right to be and persist in that place and participate in the production of a different kind of city. 39
movements across Europe that have traditionally been anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist and The recent actions of squatters therefore point to forms of care, generosity and dwelling whose
that have, as such, criticised the violent and increasingly militarised border regimes set up by their history is unthinkable outside the precarious conditions that they emerged out of. And yet, the
governments. The interactions and connections between squatters and migrants have, in this context, autonomous city charted in these pages was more than a simple matter of survival. It encompassed an
assumed a number of different forms though they have, if anything, intensified in recent years.32 expansive and enduring set of political demands; demands that still speak to how we might come to
In Spain, and in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, the recent crisis has fostered a new know and live the city differently. For squatters, the right to the city has always been a right to re-make
commitment to the development of practices that seek to resist the forms of "precarious living" the city and transform it through hope, resistance and solidarity.40
increasingly shared by migrants and local residents alike.33 Autonomous social centres and other
squatted spaces have played an important organising role in a number of campaigns around the legal
status of undocumented migrants, their right to live and work and the growing and often illegitimate
use of detention and deportation centres. As the housing crisis intensified, it was often migrants who
were most affected. Many joined the PAH movement and were active in the Obra Social campaign to
occupy and 'liberate' abandoned buildings. There were also earlier instances of squats autonomously
established by migrants such as the Cuarteles de San Andreu in Barcelona (2002-2004) or the Palacete
34
okupado in Madrid (2008).
In the end, it is not only in Spain that squatting has come to offer an urgent and necessary
alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies that seek to deny asylum seekers and refugees the
"agency to shape the city" on their own fragile terms. 35 Elsewhere across Europe, a number of squats
have been set up as spaces of refuge and hospitality for forced migrants who often find themselves in
political limbo or unable to access local social services. In Athens, there are currently seven separate
36
squats housing over 1,500 refugees. A number of squatted spaces have, in turn, been established
across Italy in Bologna, Milan, Naples, Rome and in Turin where the Ex Moi occupation (the former
37
2006 Olympic Village) houses over 1,000 squatters from 30 different countries. Similar efforts are
 One of these publics is apparently unified in their outrage, right-thinking and eternal; the other is
messy, unpredictable and prone to insurrection: one public must constantly be invoked to beat the
other, yet the one that usually "wins" is a phantom and the one that loses, a reality obscured.
But who exactly, from the standpoint of the state, is the good public?
This is the public on whose behalf the courts and the judiciary are endlessly aggrieved. In the
appeals following long prison sentences for crimes committed during the English "riots" of August
8 2011, Lord Judge, The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales made very clear the separation between
an always-already shocked public and a shocking, mobile public: 'There can be very few decent
members of our community who are unaware of and were not horrified by the rioting which took
place all over the country between 6th August and 11th August 2011 '.
The Only Good Public The public of this "community" terrified by 'the ghastliness inflicted' by the 'lawlessness' of this
month are "aghast". Etymologically speaking, they have seen a ghost.2 But, because the world is the
Is a Moving Public wrong way up, they fail to realise that they are the ghost, and that the judges are speaking on behalf of
someone that does not exist. We are not even confronted with Deleuze's claim regarding "the indignity
3
Nina Power of speaking for others" but of the far stranger idea of, from the legal standpoint, "the necessity of
speaking for non-existent others": the law must punish on behalf of mythical offended others, because
to punish for its own sake would be to scandalously admit that this is, in fact, its entire reason for
existing.
The law constantly reinforces its own identity by segregating members of the pubHc-who-are-no-
Who is this public? The one that silently demands "public art", who mutely requests "public order", longer-included in the name of a public-that-doesn't-exist. Listen to the judge in the riots appeal again:
who endlessly opines in the narrow voice of right-wing newspapers expressing some kind oflocationless
"public opinion"? There is an overwhelming obligation on sentencing courts to do what they can to ensure the protection
And who is the other public? The public that desires and increasingly occupies space, the public of the public, whether in their homes or in their businesses or in the street and to protect the homes and
that wants, expects and needs to be cared for in times of crisis, the public that believes in and aspires businesses and the streets in which they live and work. This is an imperative. 4
to the "good" but is never permitted to be the "good" public?
The obligation "overwhelms": the best the courts can do is deter through the excessive punishment of
The first public is mute but constantly chattering; the second public alive but constantly silenced.
individuals stripped out of their collective setting but punished on behalf of the "mob", the "rabble':
With the ongoing, and perhaps almost complete, destruction of the public sphere in the name of
the crowd. This is an imperative: The imperative that announces itself in the form of an imperative:
privitisation, individualism and competition, we are at the same time confronted with the necessary
The law is the law.
ghost of the acceptable public, the one invoked by the state in the name of the preservation of order.
This public is the public of property, of course (homes, businesses) and although they do not own
This is the mute, static public used against the mobile, protesting public: the punishment of those
the streets, they are permitted by the good God of the public overseer to "live and work" in them.
involved in defending public services against austerity measures takes place precisely in the name of
this other public, like two sides in a war where each participant perversely takes the same name.
 The ghost-public of the protester/rioter is nevertheless capable of 'causing injury and damage and But sometimes the law forgets it self, and fo rgets where it usually carves up "the public': the "legal
fear to even the most stout-hearted of citizens', where stout conjures images of thick beer, roundedness person" and "the law" itself. Last year, 145 protesters who sat down in a London shop to protest the
and courage, yet is afraid, always afraid, of the shattering of the thin glass of "public peace". Listen to fact that its owners avoid paying tax were arrested, stripped, given white outfits and redistributed
the voice of another judge, in 1970, where a student protest at Cambridge University was deemed to across the city. They were given a date to appear in court.
have become a riot: Yet, as 145 separate individuals, how could they possibly all fit in to the dock, designed perhaps
for a maximum of twelve individuals? They cou ldn't of course, and the law had forgotten that it cannot,
When there is wanton and vicious violence of gross degree the court is not concerned with whether it according to its own rules, punish groups as groups, but only as individuals belonging to these groups.
originates from gang rivalry or from political motives. It is the degree of mob violence that matters and The arithmetic of the law had forgotte n to show its working-out. The law would of course like to
the extent to which the public peace is broken ..
directly punish the bad public, the moving public, the public that self-organ ises and uses "public"
Any participation whatever, irrespective of its precise form, in an unlawful or riotous assembly of
space in a way that is faithful to the original meaning of the word- pertaining to the people-rather
this type derives its gravity from becoming one of those who by weight of numbers pursued a common
and unlawful purpose. lbe law of this count ry has always leant heavily against those who, to attain such
than as scared individuals scurrying alone through regimes of private property (businesses, homes,
a purpose, use the threat that lies in the power of numbers .. the surveilled st reets). But in order to defend property the law must invent and stick by the individual
In the view of this court, it is a wholly wrong approach to take the acts of any individual participator -the one who can and must be punished on behalf of the bad public, all the while invoking the on ly
in isolation. They were not committed in isolation and, as already indicated, it is that very fact that collective subject it can tolerate, and requires (the good public, the community).
constitutes the gravity of the offence. 5 The law makes a revealing mistake when it forgets to punish individuals as representatives of
groups and goes directly for the group itself. When several people alleged to have committed a serious
The breaking of a public peace (the silence of ghosts) by those who "by weight of numbers" abuse it, public order offence are up in court together, fo r example during the Miners' strikes in the 1980s, they
who play upon "the threat that lies in the power of numbers" is intolerable. The law must punish are often acquitted, according to one barrister, because the jury 'falls in love' with their solidarity, their
individuals, of course, but this punishment must be amplified, multiplied in inverse proportion to the collectivity. So the courts shift back to punishing in single file, before shoving numbers into over-
"threat of numbers". crowded jail cells where stepping out of line or organising is swiftly curtailed by prison guards and
The arithmetic of the state will take individual actions and punish them to the power of whatever endless transfers to other prisons.
it feels like. The invoking of the silent public who demands peace against the individual who invokes What does all this legal stuff mean fo r art ? For an art that strives to be public, that feels some
the wrong kind of collective hides yet another subject, however: let us call this the class-subject that is connection to the public (as that which it wants to touch, interrogate, quest ion, or be questioned by)?
committed to its own self-perpetuation, as opposed to the class that is dedicated to its own abolition. What does this mean for an art that desires or depends upon the "public purse"? The silent , ghost
We could equally say of the ruling class that 'it is a wholly wrong approach to take the acts of any public perhaps deserves some of the "public art" put up in its name, as that which is loved by no one,
individual participator in isolation' because the class operates in the interests of itself, not only as literally. But the other public, the mobile, pu nished public creates something else: an art that is public,
individuals and on behalf of individuals, but as a collective subject that gains its power from the perhaps, or a collective blurring of the boundary between the public and art itself. Against the legal
coupling of the exploitation of others with the myth that it is comprised of atomized entities that look artist-subject we can oppose the illegal artist-collective, the not-whole whose mobility cracks open the
out only for themselves. real illusion of the "good public" wh ich exists nowhere and to which no one belongs, yet whose spectre
hovers over every arrest, trial and prison in the land.
 especially bodily security, or the sa(ety o( urban space users. But, I want to suggest in what (allows,
that when security and safety are defi ning, a certain anti-urbanism rooted in fea r-what I ca ll "social
agoraphobia"-comes to be the primary structuring force of urban life.
I furthe r suggest that this anti-urbanism succeeds to the degree that it is profitable for some, often
at the expense of others. For that reason, I think it is an obligation of progressive urban scholars to
begin articulating theories that a re against safety, and against security, if we want to promote something
9 other than the antiurban city.
The fear that the securitisation of public space induces and responds to is indeed a fo rm of
agoraphobia. "Agoraphobia" is the clinical name for the experience of overwhelming fear in public
spaces. It is a serious mental disorder that affects considerably less than I percent of the population in
Against Safety, Against Security: the United States (and even fewer in Europe) (WHO 1992). 3 Agoraphobia is marked by an inordinate
fear of being in crowds or in spaces that seem to be under the control of others. Sufferers often become
1
Reinvigorating Urban Life trapped in their own homes, afraid to ventu re outside, even to go to the supermarket. It is a debilitating
illness that can lead to a complete withdrawal from social life: fear to be it1 public space can come to
define all that one does and doesn't do, and therefore all that one is.
Don Mitchell
Very, very few of us suffer from agoraphobia, at least in this sense. Even so, agoraphobia is coming
to defin e our lives.~ For us, this agoraphobia is not so much a fear to be it1 public space as an induced
fea r of public space. Upon this second kind of agoraphobia-the fear of public space- I will argue,
much contemporary capitalism now develops. Widespread agoraphobia of the first sense-the sense
Anti-urbanism takes many forms, economic as well as social, political as well as cultura l. One way that of a debilitating fear to be i11 public space-would be a d isaster for capitalism. Malls would empt y out;
anti-urbanism-defin ed perhaps as an opposition to the publicness of the city- has become manifest hopping streets would be deserted; even our private lives would become more dosed to commerce
in the spaces of the city itself is through an overweening concern with safet y and security. One ideal (and to the state) as we stopped answering the phone, refused to step outside to collect our mail, and
of urbanism is precisely that it is there, in the city, that chance, serendipity, the unexpected, has the even disconnected from the Internet for fear of who might be on line with us. By contrast, a widespread
best chance to flourish, and out of chancy, serendipitous, and unexpected encounters new social, fear of public space is enormously productive for capitalism- and for the state formations that safeguard
cultural, and political formations might arise. Rarely achieved in practice, this ideal of urbanism is it.
nonetheless critical to contemporary theories of citizenship- as something to be struggled toward .2 We are taught fear of public space in many ways. News media sensationalize assaults and murders
Control over cily space, practices of safety and security, that is, has never been stronger to the that take place in public (while minimizing the true extent of domestic violence). They exalt the values
production of urban space; but in recent history (and not just since 9/ 11) certain praclices of security of gated communities and sporls utility vehicles that insulate their owners from the surrounding
(separating out "strangers," mechanical and human surveillance, defensive design), have become, in crowds. In schools we learn that anything public-including schools!-is suspect at best, and more
many ways, defining. Discourses of safety have become dominant in discussions of "good" urban likely dysfunctional, while everything private is efficient, dean, and to be wondered at. We learn that
space. There is nothing wrong with being concerned with, and seeking to design in rela1ion to, secu rity, private property is the foundation of all freedom, and even, by the time we go to university and sit
through our first economics and politics classes, we learn that freedom is not just impossible, but in
fact inconceivable, without private property. We learn to make important distinctions. We learn that Jolla for the truly privileged, La Mesa for the merely middle class. Shopping followed the money and
"public" is the same as out of control: public spaces are the realm of crimina l violence, homeless people, moved out too, to new malls in Mission Valley or up in La Jolla, and the old propertied elite of
drugs, anarchy, terrorists; public hospitals are where one goes to find long lines and waiting lists; public downtown realised that while they might be living quite comfortably in their mansion with a view
schools "fail our children" (as American politicians like to put it); and public goods are, by definition, over the beach, their investments in downtown property were in trouble. The seed iness of Horton
simply inefficient. The private, on the other hand, is the very definition of good: publicly accessible Plaza and its denizens, the large number of cheap hotels and apartments catering to the indigent, and
private properties are where profit is made, comfort and security provided; private property, because so much property simply not being put to any conceivable "highest and best use,» became a sore in the
always efficiently allocated, works for us all; private wealth benefits us all. side of the city's elite. From about 1965, therefore, it's easy to track a steadily more insistent drum beat
Social agoraphobia is crucial in this for mulation. If clinical agoraphobia keeps people locked away of complaint in the local press: downtown is unsafe; it's dirty; it's filled with the poor, with racial
indoors, social agoraphobia delivers us into the wait ing arms of merchants in safe and secure malJs, minorities, with illicit activities. It is violent. It didn't matter that downtown crime was no higher, and
developers of securely gated neighbourhoods, and newly redeveloped urban spaces like Times Square in some cases much lower, than other city areas. Vilification of downtown became something of a local
so carefully watched over by its army of private security guards and privately operated CCTV cameras. 5 sport.7
Urban design, in other words, more and more serves both to induce fear (by so thoroughly separating This history of San Diego, in other words, is exactly the same as so many other cities: the out-of-
everyday life from the totality of the social world of which it is part) and to allay that fear by providing control New York of the 1970s, Glasgow in the 1980s, Vancouver in the 1990s. And like all these other
spaces of sociability that feel urban at the same time they feel controlled, safe, surveilled, and almost cities, such vilification served an important purpose: once demonized, the city could be saved. In San
entirely unthreatening. Diego a newly revitalized redevelopment agency, controlled by large property owners, arranged to
Consider in this regard downtown San Diego, California. San Diego is a city where being outside, condemn much of the property around Horton Plaza and hand it over to a large suburban mall
being in public, is-or at least should be- immensely pleasurable. The sun shines; it is warm year developer, the Hahn Corporation (builder of the wildly successful University Town Center in La Jolla
round; and even massive suburban growth and I 960s-style urban redevelopment fai led to fu lly destroy that did so much to empty out downtown). Hahn built the festival marketplace-style Horton Plaza
the old, walkable downtown. 6 Horton Plaza is the old heart of downtown. It was once an open square, Shopping Center on the land handed over to him. As part of the deal, the City of San Diego rebuilt
deeded by city developer Alonzo Horton in 1894 to create a central gathering place, somet hing like a Horton Plaza Park, moving the bus stop that used to be next to it three blocks down the street (so that
cross between a Latin American plaza and a New England town common . He stipulated in his deed to those waiting for the bus would no longer hang out in the park), fencing off the open lawn, removing
the city that it remain foreve r open and foreve r public. It was a ceremonial square, where politicians the benches from in front of the new mall's main department store, and el iminating the public toilets
gave speeches on national holidays, and city grandees showed themselves off. It was also where strikers that used to be below the park. The city even gave the name-Horton Plaza- to the Hahn Company,
gathered and rallied against the bosses of the new city, where preachers sought to convince passersby allowing it to trademark it , make it its own property. Nothing else could use the name Horton Plaza,
of the wrath of a vengeful God-or the beneficence of a loving one-and where transient workers so the plaza became Horton Park. (And when I talk to local San Diegans these days and just say
rested between jobs, trips to the saloon, and registering at the nearby employment offices. "Horton Plaza" they always think I am talking about the shopping center.) The new downtown mall
By the 1960s, transient workers were gone, replaced by active and discharged service men from opened to much fanfare in 1984. Predictions were that it would save downtown. 8 In many ways these
the nearby military bases, and especially by the elderly poor who lived in surrounding Single Room predictions were right (if we don't worry too much fo r now about what "save" might mean), but it took
Occupancy (SRO) hotels, and used the tree-shaded benches of the plaza as an outdoor sitting room. awhile.
Like the rest of the downtown (outside the skyscraper core) with its small residence hotels, cheap bars, The poor and elderly, for example, failed to get the message and insisted on continuing to use the
and burlesque shows, Horton Plaza was a lively, if decidedly seedy, place. But it was also an increasingly park. As did military service members. So the city arranged for the USO- an organisation dedicated
class-specific one, as the bourgeoisie and the wealthy moved out of downtown to the new suburbs, La to providing welfare and recreation fo r military people-to move out of downtown. It stepped up its
demolition of Single Room Occupancy Hotels. It got the Rescue Mission, providing services to the city as a whole, coupled with the fact that the streets and sidewalks of the Gaslamp remained public
homeless, to move to what was then called Center City East, and in 1989, the City once again agreed property that the homeless had a presumptive right to be on, presented the city with a certain problem:
to the redevelopment of the park. This time they used the Hahn corporation's own money (there was homeless-induced fear of public space could easily become a hindrance to making money off the
no pretence of public funding) to remove the lawn and all the benches. The lawn was replaced with redeveloped landscapes of the city. If wealthy patrons (suburbanites, tourists, convention-goers) stayed
prickly plants, the benches were simply not replaced. After this redesign, it simply became impossible away from the Gaslamp restaurants, or refused to cross Horton Plaza Park to get into the shopping
to sit comfortably anywhere in the plaza. The park became a conduit to the Mall (where there was center, the profit machine that San Diego was being turned into would grind to a halt.
plenty of seating, at least at the restaurants, cafes, and fast food joints, and at least if you spent money Bound by the United States Constitution, no less (in many cases) than by their own knowledge of
in these places). After this redevelopment, there was no reason to stop in the park, and every reason who was on the streets and why they were there, the public, city police felt constrained in their ability
now to hurry toward the open doors of the shops. to move the poor out, to get them off the streets and out of the parks, to just to push them out of
And so that's what everyone did- except of course the poor and homeless who were not welcome downtown. The public police could not, legally at least, bar the poor from the streets and parks open
on the private property of the Horton Plaza Shopping Center. Private security guards patrolled the to the public. But from property owners and from the newly arriving upscale residential population
walkways and sitting areas of the mall, forcibly removing anyone they found to be "undesirable." The of the 1980s and 1990s (drawn in by a veritable explosion of condominium construction) came a loud
contrast between the clean, safe, open space of the private mall, and the now entirely unwelcoming cry: "The homeless must go!" The answer, originally, was much the same as in the rest of the United
space of the public park could not have been clearer. Indeed, it was made especially stark by the fact States. In the midst of the Reagan and later neoliberal reforms, the new urbanists of San Diego, and
that no matter the destruction of all the Single Room Occupancy hotels, no matter the eviction of their representatives in city government, saw the answer not in making room for the poor by providing
services for the homeless and elderly to other parts of town, homeless people, the indigent elderly, and affordable housing, and certainly not in striking a blow against poverty by seeking to reform an
other "down-and-outs" still often sat on the low curbs, or directly on the walkways, invoking a certain increasingly and glaringly unjust political economy, but in using even more privatisation to push them
abject fear, or at the least disgust, in office workers as they tried to enter the mall at lunchtime. Once out- to just make the poor and homeless disappear.
in the mall, once safely on private property, all was sparkle and splendor, cosy seats awaited, the Horton Plaza Shopping Center was the model: on private property, poor and homeless people, or
abundance of the market beckoned, the prerogatives of a stylish city life were there for the taking or youth and sometimes even people of colour, seeking to hang out in the comfortable confines of the
the buying, at any rate. mall, could simply be excluded (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, pp. 59- 70). 9 They could be stopped at the
In the meantime, the success of Horton Plaza Shopping Center, which rapidly began attracting entrance; curfews cou ld be invented. If they snuck in, they could be forcibly removed. The homeless
tourists and suburban residents (who could drive to the mall and park in its garages without once ever and loitering youth could be removed because private police- and for that matter the public police-
setting foot on a city street or in Horton Park), had begun to have a spillover effect (just as hoped and could enforce the wishes of private property owners. But this is less easy on publicly owned streets. So
planned) in the neighbouring "Gaslamp Quarter" (a gentrifying turn-of-the-century district), which in the late 1990s, the City Council voted to withdraw many public services (street cleaning, garbage
rapidly developed into an upscale bar and restaurant district, with those Single Room Occupancy collection, and some policing functions) - to just stop funding them- in the downtown area, and
hotels that were not simply demolished magically transformed into upscale boutique hotels for wealthy simu ltaneously to allow a private organisation to collect a fee from business and property owners to
tourists. Not incidentally, then, the gentrification of the Gaslamp forced hundreds or thousands of provide these services. Beholden to their new fee paying clients, rather than to the Constitution or
very poor, often elderly people, out of their homes and into the streets and the tattered shelter system voters, and freed of other claims on these funds, the newly instituted Property and Business Improve-
of the city. So while a relatively small number of homeless or other poor people hanging out, however ment District (P-BID) increased street cleaning services. They also implemented new private police-
uncomfortably, in the redesigned Horton Plaza Park, had the rather positive effect of pushing more like patrols, whose main job, as the President of the P-BID told my colleague Lynn Staeheli and myself
wealthy people even more rapidly into the space of the mall, the growing numbers of homeless in the in an interview, was "to get in the face" of homeless people and make it clear that they did not belong
downtown- to "roust" them, as he put it. rn The P-BID named these new services "Clean and Safe"- One of the primary advocates for the homeless in San Diego, Father Joe Carroll of St . Vincent de
and that was its goal, to make the streets clean and safe for particu lar classes of people by getting rid Paul, the largest provider of se rvices to the homeless in the city, told Lynn Staeheli and me that as a
of others. resident of the city, he wished all publi c spaces would be privatised and all the homeless kicked out. 12
And Clean and Safe could get away with this precisely because it was private. As private people, And in the summer of 2007, a reporter for a weekly San Diego newspaper laughed out loud as she was
uniformed Clean and Safe guards were understood, by law, to be merely engaged in free expression interviewing me about San Diego's plans to create more downtown parks and I said that was all well
when they told the poor and homeless to get out. As long as they did no bodily harm to homeless or and good, but they really ought to be public and not like the baseball park or what Horton Plaza had
other street people, who after all still had a putative right to be on public property, the private Clean become. She thought I was being completely unrealistic (as sympathetic as she actually was to my
and Safe patrols could do wonde rs in making it clear that street people were not welcome. They could argument).
induce in them a very well-grounded fear of (remaining in) public space. I was being unrealistic because it is now just so utterly obvious, just so much common sense, in
With very little debate, then, much policing in San Diego has been privatised, using the public's American cities, that the induced fea r of public space is beneficial, something devoutly to be wished
fear of public space as a pretext. So successful has th is been than when presented an opportunity (and for than to be fought against. People still want to be in public, but they only want to be in public if the
indeed the legal obligation) to create a new park downtown, the City of San Diego simply turned the public place they are in is private: if it is privately owned and privately policed. The benefits of such a
task of regulation to a private concern: the San Diego Padres baseball team. Like many Am erican cities, state of affairs are obvious. Disney, for example, has become a large urban planner and developer, hired
San Diego wanted to build a new baseball stadium downtown. And like many American cit ies, it to remake whole streetscapes in Seattle and (most famous ly) to refashion New York's Times Square in
wanted to create the surrounding district in the image of the old public city, a city that provided public an image of spectacular, now "family oriented," consumption. u It has also created Celebration, a fu lly
space, st reet life, and the sort of vibrancy generally considered to be at the heart of urbanism. And yet, planned, fu lly private town in Florida, whe re the st reetscapes are supposed to evoke turn -of-t he-
at least ostensibly, very few people in San Diego really wanted public space-the history of the twentieth centu ry small American cit ies (where streets are easily walkable, fu ll of people, and not
destruction of Horton Plaza Park and the great success of Horton Plaza Shopping Center's pseudo- dominated by the automobile), but where also, nonresidents can simply be barred from entering. All
public space made that abu nd antly clear. What they wanted was someth ing that seemed like public services are private, all laws and ru les are written by Disney (and almost impossible to change by the
space, but really wasn't. residents) and all polici ng is geared towa rd maintaining not urban life but property values. 14
The solution for San Diego was to assure that the park built in conjunction with the baseball Across the continent in Los Angeles, Universal Studios has built "City Walk;' des igned by the
stadium-the park that was to be the truth of the vibrant, public city- never was public. Rather, the architect Jon Jerde, who also designed Horton Plaza Mall, and where for a fee one can wander a perfect
City granted to the baseball team the right to come up with a plan for when the park would open, urban scene complete with a few- but not too many- picturesque beggars (who are City Walk
under what conditions, and who wou ld be allowed in and who would be kept out. Right fro m the employees, dressed up in costume and requ ired to follow a script in their interactions with visitors).
beginning, then, this city property and ostensibly public space was not public at all and ci ty property Strollers in City Walk are offered a carefu lly controlled, and therefore guaranteed never to be disap-
in name only: it was a tightly controlled simulacra of public space geared just as much as was Horton pointing, urban experience. 15 The long history of inducing fear of public space makes such develop-
Plaza to the making of money. After all , the San Diego Padres Baseball team was granted the right to ments seem not just logical. not just safe, but utterly desirable. It makes the shopping mall-with its
close the park altogether when basebal l games were being played to assure that no one would be able every square meter privately owned and carefully managed to assure profit-seem like the highest
to see the game unless they paid the price of admission to the stadium. Developing the park this way achievement of urbanism. Horton Plaza Shopping Center is not just now the symbolic center of
has proved to be widely popular with the people of San Diego, who feel that by being privately downtown San Diego, it is the center of downtown San Diego.
controlled, the parks (as well as the stadium, the shopping center, and the bars and restaurant district Fear of public space helps us realise that a life lived off the property of capital is a life not worth
of the Gaslamp) will necessarily be more safe. 11 living. It induces a deep desire for space that is commodified, carefully designed, utterly predictable
{in the way that a night at the Hard Rock Cafe, anywhere in the world, is utterly predictably and edges, a few pesky homeless people, for example, who have no place to be, no place to go, except the
therefore fun - as a recent (2007) Hard Rock magazine advertising campaign says, "you know where public spaces that no longer exist- the private provision of safety and security through the privatisation
to go." Where we want to go, apparently, is a controlled environment, because we know that whenever of property is efficient, serving great goods to great numbers.
we are in a controlled environment, we are in a good environment. One could, of course, make a valiant defense of those pesky homeless people, on classic liberal
And so this induced fear of public space, and this banishment of fear from controlled space that grounds having to do with the sanctity of individuals' human lives, or on more radical grounds having
might just appear public, makes us want to have our fingers printed, our retinas scanned, our backpacks to do with the way that capitalism works and what it does to those who somehow cannot sell their
searched, and our credit limits preapproved. It doesn't just make us want these, really; what it does is labour power, and indeed I have tried in much of my work, to make these kinds of defenses. 16 But I
make us miss this kind of surveillance when we are not subject to it. When we are not subject to the think there is a broader, and necessary, if perhaps more abstract argument to be made against the
careful designs and even more careful surveillance of private capital (the same capital that awaits to forms of security and safety that capital and its client state is making for us in contemporary cities.
sell us a bottle of water when we are thirsty even though there is a public tap right at hand; the same This broader argument against safety and security is in fact a positive argument for a right to the city
capital that entices us with a new sweater when we are a little depressed, even though our closets are that begins by rejecting any induced fear of public space, even if, or perhaps because, some public
already overly full), we start to feel vulnerable and exposed. We start to feel like we have no safe retreat. spaces are, indeed, unsafe.
The streets around us, the palm-shaded Plazas we used to visit, all become places to be avoided. It
might be better to just stay at home, with the lights dimmed, and maybe just read a book, or even just
climb into bed and stay there and never come out- and, perhaps, even stop shopping.
Without the private police of the mall, that is, without the security guards hired by the Property- The idea of a right to the city is closely associated, of course, with Henri Lefebvre. 17 For him the right
Based Business Improvement District- San Diego's "Clean and Safe" program- without the agents of the city was a "cry and demand"- something vital, something necessary, something both under threat
"homeland security" probing into every aspect of our lives (and whisking to jail those who have the and in need of creation. The right to the city, for Lefebvre, was primarily the right to participate in the
temerity to protest, and do research, against gentrification), without the geniuses of marketing always making of the city, the right to shape urban life, the right to what he called centrality- which is the
probing to find out what makes us comfortable (and thus willing to spend) and what makes us afraid right to be present and alive and at the heart of things. Lefebvre called the right to the city, as a right
{and therefore likely to bury our wallets even deeper in our pockets), we start to feel afraid, almost .. to make the city, the right to the oeuvre: the right to the city as a work or a project. The right to the city
agoraphobic. was thus always a "right- in-the-making;' not a once-and-for-all established institution or attribute, not
Thus by producing places that are public space's safe, clean, better simulacra, private property and so much a liberty right that gives one a nearly unfettered ability to do as one pleases in some aspect of
its privatising ally the neoliberal state, is there to assure, by making us afraid of public space, that we social life, but rather a form of power, a form of empowerment. The right to the city is, especially, a
need not be afraid in the new, private, public space- that we never tru ly, and unprofitably, become form of collective empowerment. As Lefebvre put it,
agoraphobic.
Among these rights in the making features the right to the city (not the ancient city, but to urban life, to
renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full
and complete usage of these moments and places, etc.) 18
But why should I, why should we, be against this? Why should we be against security, against safety?
Surely one of the primary jobs of the state- of any state, and indeed of any society- is to assure the Centrality, encounter, exchange, life rhythms: this is a language of use and belonging, of being in and
security and safety of its members. And surely, though there may be some few problems around the part of a multifarious public. It is not merely the language of consumption and security. It is rooted, in
fact, in a conception of the city as an ongoing project of difference in which collective use values
predominate. It is therefore a conception of the city in which the possibility of disorder- the possibility reimposition offear as a structuring fo rce: a fea r not only of the potential violence of the revolutionaries,
for a certain loss of control, a cert ain insecurity- is always present and not necessarily entirely to be and a fea r not only of the actual and organised violence of the state, but especially a fear of space itself
feared. Th is loss of control, this insecurity, is in itself productive of the right to the city. -a fear of that thing that revolutionary, or even everyday, people, possessed of a right to the city
Yet the right to the city is not necessarily an end in and of itself. According to Lefebvre, the end actually produce. A radical right to the city, in other words, is- and must be- the antithesis of fear,
toward which the right to the city as oeuvre tends is, la Fete, wh ich is a "celebration which consumes the antithesis of the social agoraphobia so carefully constructed in contemporary cities.
unproductively, without other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enormous riches in money and
object." La Fete- the festival- for Lefebvre was a moment of Dionysian revel, in which everyday life
was turned on its head (even as the festival was part of everyday life). As Andy Merrifield has put it,
"During fes tivals, people d ropped their veils and stopped perfor ming, ignored authority and let rip." 19 Agoraphobia- clinical or social-is a fo rm of paranoia, and paranoia defines much contemporary life.
One of the hallmarks of the twentieth century, according to the rock critic and social theorist Greil Paranoia is the state of being "very distrustful or suspicious of others:' 24 Paranoia is both a generalised
Marcus (1989), was how the fes tive spectacle became generalised through commodity production and condition and, as we have seen, a strategy-a st rategy of control and a strategy for profit. It is also, in
was regularly enacted in a rock club, on TV, and now, in its particularly safe and secure mode, in the its landscape manifestat ions, utterly banal. What this paranoia looks like is San Diego's Horton Plaza
very spaces of San Diego's Horton Plaza Shopping Center, both diluting its force and making ii more -both the park and the shopping center. What it looks like is the so-called public park outside the
productive for exchange value than for use value. Noneth eless, and against this commodification of San Diego baseball stadium. What it looks like are all the fee-based play zones that have sprung up to
the spectacle, Lefebvre, to the end of his li fe, held out hope that the festival, as Merrifield put ii, could profit from parents too scared to let the ir children play outside. What it looks like is a CCTV camera
b, on every corner, above every doorway, observing every space. What it looks like, perhaps, is Las Vegas.
Las Vegas, in the last generation, has been "reinvented" as a "family resort:' 25 But that is not the most
a special, potentially modern form of Marxist practice that could erupt on an urban st reet or in an interesting thing about it. Rather, the true attraction of Las Vegas is that every social act, and every
alienated factory. The festival was a pure spontaneous moment, a popular "safety valve," a catharsis for risk, is scripted in advance. You know the odds, and you know they are not in your favour and that the
everyday passions and dreams, something both liberating and antithetical: to papal infallibility and house always wins, but that is better than not knowing what is around the next bend or about to
Stalinist dogma, to Hitlerism and free-market earnestness, to bourgeois cant and born-again bul!shit. 20 happen in the park across the street.
In other words, the fear of homeless people that has driven both the redevelopment of Horton
In other words, la Fete-and thus the city as oeuvre, and thus the right to the city-is dangerous: it is, Plaza Park and the creation of the "Clean and Safe" program, or even just the amorphous fea r of what
indeed, against sa fety, and against secu rity, at least as it is conceived in the contemporary ci ty defi ned Zygmunt Bauman aptly notes is often just apprehended as an unknowable "world out there;• is in fact
by the fear of public space. La FCte portends instead a world out of control, a world where the the fear of the unknown wit/Jin a well- known context: the context of urban space. 26 The goal fo r
disempowered are empowered, and where safety and security take a back seat to joy and creativity- planners then, in Vegas or in San Diego, is to change the context, to rework the space so that something
and to radically transformed geographical contexts. 21 other than a right to the city in the Lefebvrian sense can be made and maintained. The goal is to
After all, as Lefebvre wrote elsewhere, the 1871 Paris Commune "was the biggest celebration of the regiment space so that behaviours may be all the more carefully scripted, but to do so, as in Las Vegas,
century and modern times;• and the only real "crack at revolutionary urbanism the modern world has in such a way so that such new spaces are, indeed, just what we want, just what we desire. We know
faced "- which goes for in explaining the fo rce of the reaction the Com mune called up. 22 As David where to go.
Harvey has shown so well, the reclamation of Paris by the forces of order requi red a reordering of
space, a remaking of the imprint of power over and in public space. 23 It required, in a word, a
 Fear both of public space and in public space-the generalised social agoraphobia I have been the Court could not have been clearer, that the whole privatisation and trespass-barment procedure
talking about today- thu s serves as a pretext for a larger reordering of social interactions, and a hoped- was a ruse. Upholding the arrest and permanent barment of a young man who had otherwise done no
for general surrender to authority, 27 a surrender that makes la Fete, except in a scripted bacchanal as harm (he was on his way to visit his girlfriend and children), the Court intoned:
in Las Vegas, not only unrealisable, but unthinkable.
This surrender to authority takes many forms. It is often expressed in polls through a simplistic Most importantly, both the notice barment rule and the "legitimate business and social purpose rule"
assessment of how many, and what kinds of civil liberties people are willing to trade for a greater sense apply to all persons who enter the streets of Whitcomb Court {the housing estate whose streets had been
privatised] ... The rules apply to strollers, loiterers, drug dealers, roller skaters, bird watchers, soccer
of security. Sometimes it is expressed as an argument against liberty itself. It is not uncommon here,
players, and others not engaged in constitutionally protected activity ..
certainly in the American case, that it is precisely the abandonment of rules, tradition , and "order,"
especially in the 1960s, that has led to the abandonment of all that is ethical and good. Too much
For the court, the only constitutionally protected activity is handing out leaflets and asking fo r
liberty, this argument goes, has spawned nothing but mayhem (and people sleeping on the streets).
signatures on a petition. What the Court is saying is that we have no a priori right to be on the streets
For the conservative commentator Heather Macdonald, reflecting on the continuing crisis of home-
unless (1) we have a legitimate business purpose; (2) we have a legitimate-that is state sanctioned-
lessness in San Francisco, the problem is not that people cannot afford a place to live and shelter beds
social purpose; or (3) we are engaged in legitimate- that is state sanctioned- political activities. We
are woefully too few in number, rather, it is that San Francisco too ardently "pursu[ ed ] freedom" and
have no right to just hang out; we have no right to the city. 11,is is what an over-weaning concern with
what it got instead was "chaos." But, at the time she was writing, when there was a talk -tough mayor
safety and security gets us.
in office, she was heartened that San Francisco was "rediscovering that liberty consists not in over-
turning social rules, but in mutual adherence to them."28 Alas, this did not solve homelessness either,
even if it did manage to criminalise homeless people, but that is not the point.
The point is that the reinforcement of order itself comes to stand as a social good in and of itself. One of the most important aspects of this Supreme Court case is its endorsement of trespass laws in
30
This love of order has strange effects. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the public space. By endorsing the expansion of trespass rules into public property, the Court is creating
conviction of a young man in Richmond, Virginia named Kevin Hicks.29 In this case, the Cou rt a powerful tool for the maintenance of safety and security and the destruction of rights to the city.
declared that it was perfect ly legal for a city council to transfer ownership of public streets to a This tool is a tool of purification and pacification; it is a tool of spatial control in that it is designed to
semipublic agency- that is to take a step even further than San Diego has attempted with its Clean carefully vet and regulate where people are the better to control what they do.
and Safe program , and hand the st reets themselves right over to an unaccountable agency. In the This is not at all a new strategy, but it is one gaining in fo rce. Keeping people ou t-out of nation-
Richmond case, when the city gave its streets to the local housing authority, it also required that space as well as city space-is now a primary task of any government. And no wonder. For, by the
authority to post no trespassing signs, and to arrest any person who did not have an (undefined) 1990s, according to the great British satirist, we had all become aware of"Global Warning:• "Every-
"legitimate social or business purpose:• Once arrested for trespassing, and in fact even before then, a where," Brown says:
person could also be served with what was called a "trespass-barmen! notice" that banned her or him
forever from the once-public streets. There was a rise in Global Warning. Every day, there were new Global Warnings about killer viruses,
The pretext for this rather drastic move was drug dealing, and also the war on terrorism if the oral killer waves, killer drugs, killer icebergs. killer vaccines, killer killers and other possible causes of
arguments of the U.S. Solicitor General and the briefs of various state governments are to be believed imminent death. At fi rst these Global Warni ngs were frightening, but after a while people came to enjoy
- but the bid, of course, is to gain authoritarian control over the streets and to make them the them. 31
functional equivalent of the private space of a mall- like Horton Plaza Shopping Center. In its decision
Or at least some people did. If you were one of those imminent threats, not killer vaccines, but killer, of urban life, or really the destruction of urban life, that this entails becomes something truly to be
or just jobless, immigrants, who might also be killer terrorists, or you were a homeless person who desired. Private means safe; private means secure. Public is nothing more, and nothing less, than
merely wanted a place to sit, even if you smelled like shit, then nation-, continent-, and city space anarchy.
became a fortress from which you were to be absolutely excluded. And on city streets, the tool of
choice for securing public space against the likes of you is the enforcement of no trespassing laws. In
the city, no trespass laws seem to be the last stay against the Global Warnings Craig Brown sees as
determining everyday life. They are certainly the last stay against the likes of Kevin Hicks, whose main As early as 1961, Henri Lefebvre warned of the "reprivatisation of life"34 - a warning echoed repeatedly
35
crime you might be interested to know, was seeking to bring diapers to his girlfriend and baby. Or at by, for example, the urban sociologist Richard Sennett. The answer for both Sennett and Lefebvre
least that was his official crime. His real crime, of course, was that he was young, and male, and black, was to reinhabit the city as a city, and- against the overweening power of the no trespass sign, against
and therefore a perceived threat to the safety and security of the streets. safety, against security- to reassert those urban values of difference, strangeness, and danger. We must
Given this, engaging in the act of trespass, in the city of safety and security, takes on new meaning, reinhabit not only the city, but city spaces, recognising fear and danger not as something that can, or
new importance. Trespass is not only a "crime against property" (as if it is possible to commit a crime even that should be vanquished, but something that has to be lived. To learn to live in this fear, to assert
against a mere thing), and it is not only an act of disobedience (and such perceived disobedience to the values of the urban despite it, and to fight instead for a world of productive difference where
authority is certainly what drew the ire of the local judge when Kevin Hicks was first arrested). Rather, trespasser- that world of warrants and authorization- takes a backseat to inclusion and joy, where
to trespass is now, precisely, to "make an unwarranted claim, intrude, encroach;' not just upon a safety is subordinate to the frisson of urbanity, and where security plays second fiddle to the right to
person's time or attention, their patience or their property (as the dictionary wou ld have it), but the city as an oeuvre, to do that is the challenge that faces us not only as radical urban scholars, but
especially upon the authority of the state and capital. 32 Hanging out in Horton Plaza Park or walking even more as people who live in the here and now and want to live somewhere better.
the streets of the Whitcomb Court housing project is truly an unwarranted claim. To be "warranted"
33
means "permitted by law or authority, authorized, justified, sanctioned" and there is almost nothing
left that we can permissibly do in our everyday urban lives that is not, now, warranted. Without
permission, without authorization, we are always intruders; we are always intruders against and on
the safety and security of the spaces we seek to occupy. And- crucially- so is everyone else. Until
authority can be established and shown, we are all now potential trespassers, each making a claim on
another's attention, time, property, and sense well-being.
It is enough to make one agoraphobic. Paranoia threatens to reign supreme, and the only way to
corral it is to reconstruct the world as one in which the no trespassing sign, and the desire for the
safety and security it seems to represent, the willing surrender to a higher authority that it truly signals,
is welcomed with open arms and deeply internalized. The only way to corral this paranoia, to reassure
our desire for safety and security is to create a world in which trespass is foundational to governance.
And, so, privatisation of urban space- the creation of Clean and Safe and Horton Plaza Shopping
Center and the handing of public parks over to private corporation- together with the privatisation
 The notion of com mons in (urban) space is often complicated by archaic models of orga nisation
and management - ~,he pasture we knew how to shareQ. There is a tendency to give the impression tlrnt
the solution is in reverting past models. In the realm of digital though, the re is no "pasture" from the
Middle Ages to fa ll back on. Digital commons had to start from scratch and define its own protocols
of production and reproduction (caring and sharing). Therefore, the digital commons and free soft ware
community can be the one to turn to, not only for inspiration and advice, but also as a part ner when
13 addressing questions of urban commons. Or, as Marcell Mars would put it "if we could slart again
with (regulating and defining) land, knowing what we know now about digital networks, we could
come up with something much better and appropriate for today's world. That property wouldn't be
private, maybe not even property, but something else. Only then can we say we have learned something
Legal Hacking and Space from the digital."

Enclosure as the trigger for action

Dubravka Sekulic
The moment we turn to commons in relation to (urban) space is the moment in which the pressure to
privatise public space a nd to com modify every aspect of urban life has become so strong, it mirrors
the introduction of the Magna Carta Libertatum seeking to protect the basic reproduction of life fo r
those whose sustenance was connected to the common pastures and forests of England in the thi rteenth
"Commons a re a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the use and disposition of century. At the end. of the twentieth century, urban space became the ultimate commodity, and
resources. Their sa lient characteristic, which defines them in contrad isti nction to prope rty, is that no increasing privatisation not only endangered the reproduction of everyday li fe in the city; the rent
single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead, extraction through privatised public space and housing endangered bare life itself. Addit iona lly, the
resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less cities' continuous privatisation of its amenities transformed almost every action in the city, no matter
defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from "anything goes~ to quite crisply how mundane- as fo r ex ample, drinking a glass of water from a tap-, into an action that creates profit
articulated formal rules that are effectively enfo rced:' for some private entity and extracts it from the community. Thus, every activity became labour, which
The above definition of commons, from the seminal paper "The political economy of commons" a citizen-worker is not only alie nat ed from, but also unaware of. David Harvey's stateme nt about the
by Yochai Benkler, addresses a ny type of commons, whether analogue or digital. 1 In fac1, the concept city replacing the factory as a site of class war seems to be not only an apt description of the condition
oflife in the city, but also a c ry fo r act ion.
of commons entered 1he digital realm from physical space in order to inte rpret the type of commu nities,
relationships and production that Slarted to appear with the development of the free as opposed to the When Richard Stallman turned to the foundat ional gesture of the c reation of free software, GNU/
proprietary. Peter Linebaugh charted in his excellent book Magna Carta Manifesto, how the creation GPL (General Public Licence) was his reaction to the a rtificially imposed logic of scarcity on the world
and development of the concept of commons were closely connected to constantly changing relation- of code- and the increasing and syste matic enclosure that took place in the late 1970s a nd 1980s as "a
ships of people and communities to the physical space. Here, I argue that the concept was enriched tidal wave of commercialization transformed software from a technical object into a commodity, to be
when it was implemented in the digital fi eld. Readdressing urban space through the lens of digital bought and sold on the open market under the alleged protection of intellectual property law". 2
commons can enable another imaginat ion and knowledge to appear around urban commons. Stallman, who worked as a researcher at MIT's Artificia l Intelligence Laboratory, detected how
 "[m]any programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system software. 11 ma y enable them monopoly of capitalists (of all sorts) over owne rship of the means of production, including fi rrnnce
to make more money, but ii requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather and land . All rent, recall, is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of some crucial :isset,
than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the shari ng of programs;
such as land or a patent. The monopoly power of private property is therefore both the beginning-
marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends.
point and the end-point of all capitalist activity''6. Stallman envisioned a bleak future but found a way
The purchaser of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally. many decide
that friendship is more important. But those who belie,'e in law often do not feel at ease with either
to "relate the means to the ends". He understood that the emancipatory task of a st ruggle "is not only
choice. They become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making money". 3 what has to be done, but also how it will be done and who will do it':7 Thus, to produce the necessary
requirements-both for a community to emerge, but also for the basis of future protocols-tools and
In the period between 1980 and 1984, M one man (Stallman ) envisioned a crusade to change the methodologies are needed for the commun ity to create both free software and itself.
4
situation". Stallman understood that in order to subvert the system, he would have to intervene in the
protocols that regulate the conditions under which the code is produced, and not the code itself; Renegotiating (undo ing) property, hacking the law, creating community
although he did cont ribute some of the best lines of code into the compiler and text editor-the Property, as an instrument of allocation of resources, is a right that is negotiated within society and by
foundational infrastructure for any development. The gesture that enabled the creation of a free society and not written in stone or given as such. The digital, more than any other field, discloses
software community that yielded the complex field of digital commons was not a perfect line of code. property as being inappropriate fo r contemporary relationships between production and reproduction
The creation of GNU General Public License (CPL) was a legal hack to counteract the imposing of and, additionally, proves how it is possible to fundamentally rethink it. The digital offers this possibility
intellectual property law on code. as it is non-material, non-rival and non-exclusive, unlike anything in the physical world. 8 And Elinor
At that time, the on ly license available for programmers wanting to keep the code free was public Ostrom's lifelong empirical researches give ground to the belief that eschewing property, being the sole
domain, which gave no protection against the code being appropriated and closed. GPL enabled free instrument of allocat ion, ca n work :is a tool of management even for rival, exdudable goods.
codes to become self-perpetua ting. Everyth ing built using a free code had to be made available under The value of information in digital form is not flat, but property is not the way to protect that value,
the same condition, in order to secure the freedom for programmers to continue sharing and not as the music industry realised during the course of the last ten years. Once the copy is out there, the
breaking the law. "By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary program s, we can be cost of protecting its exclu sivity on the grounds of property becomes too high in relation to the
hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as an example to inspire :ind as 3 potential value to be extracted. for example, the value is extracted from information through control -
banner to rally others to join in sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony, which is impossible if ling the moment of its release and not through subsequent exploitation. Stallman decided to tackle the
we use software, which is not free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important imposition of the concept of property on computer code (and by extension to the digital realm as a
happiness that money ca nnot replace". 5 whole) by articu lating it in another field: just as property is the product of constant negot iations within
Architects and planners as well as environmental designers have for too long believed the opposite, a society, so are legal regulations. After some time, he was joined by "[ m) any free software developers
that a good enough design can subvert the logic of enclosure that dominates the production and [who] do not consider intellectual property instru ments as the pivotal stimulus for a marketplace of
reproduction of space; that a good enough design can keep space open and public by the sheer strength ideas and knowledge. Instead, they see them as a fo rm of restriction so fundamental (or poorly
of spatial intervention. Stall -man rightfully understands that no design is strong enough 10 keep private executed) that they need to be counteracted through alternative legal agreements that treat knowledge,
ownership from claiming what it believes belongs to it. inventions, and other creative expressions not as property but rather as speech to be freely shared,
circulated, and modified': 9
Digital and urban commons, despite operating in completely different realms and economies, are
under attack from the same threat of "market processes" that "crucially depend upon the individual The digital sphere can give a valid example of how renegotiating regulation can transform a
resource from scarce to abundant. The change from analogue signal to packet switching was accom-
panied by a renegotiation of the way the radio frequence spectrum was managed. The amount of slots the borders of legality of private property" by legally hacking the institution of a foundation to "serve
of space to be allocated grew by an order of magnitude while the absolute size of the spectrum stayed a public, or common, purpose" and having "notarized [a] document registered with the Italian state,
the same. This shift enabled Brecht's dream of a two-sided radio to become reality, thus enabling what that creates a precedent for other people to follow in its way''. 12 Sounds familiar to Stallman's hack as
he had suggested: "change this apparatus over from distribution to communication". the fundamental gesture by which community and the whole eco-system can be formed.
According to Lawrence Lessig, what regulates behaviour in cyberspace is an interdependence of It is obvious that, in order to create and sustain that type of legal hack, it is a necessity to have a
four constraints: market, law, architecture and norms. 10 Analogously, space can be put in place of certain level of awareness and knowledge of how systems, both political and legal, work, i.e. to be
cyberspace, as the regulation of space is the sum of these four constraints. These four constraints are politically literate. "While in general~ says Italian commons-activist and legal scholar Saki Bailey,
in a dynamic relationship in which the balance can be tilted towards one, depending on how much "we've become extremely lazy [when it comes to politics]. We've started to become a kind of society of
each of these categories puts pressure on the other three. Changes in any one reflect the regulation of people who give up their responsibility to participate by handing it over to some charismatic leaders,
the whole. "Architecture" in Lessig's theory should be understood broadly as the "bu ilt environment" experts of [a] different type". Free software hackers, in order to understand and take part in a constant
that regulates behaviour in (cyber )space. In the last few decades we have experienced the domination negotiation that takes place on a legal level between the market that seeks to cloister the code and
of the market reconfiguring the basis of norms, law and architecture. In order to counteract this, the hackers who want to keep it free, had to become literate in an arcane legal language. Gabriella Coleman
other three constraints need to be renegotiated. In digital space, this reconfiguration happened by notes in Coding Freedom that hacker forums sometimes tend to produce legal analysis that is just as
declaring the code- that is, the set of instructions written as highly formalized text in a specific serious as one would expect to find in a law office. Like the occupants of Teatro Valle, free software
programming language to be executed (usually) by the computer- to be considered as speech in front hackers understand the importance of devoting time and energy to understand constraints and to find
of the law, and by hacking the law in order to disrupt the way that property relationships are formed. ways to structurally divert them.
To put it simply, in order to create a change in dynamics between the architecture, norms and the This type of knowledge is not shared and created in isolation, but in socialization, in discussions
market, the law had to be addressed first. This is not a novel procedure, "legal hacking is going on all in physical or cyber spaces (such as #ire chat rooms, forums, mailing lists ... ), the same way free
the time, it is just that politics is doing it under the veil of legality because they are the parliament, software hackers share their knowledge about code. Through this process of socializing knowledge,
they are Microsoft, which can hire a whole law fi rm to defend them and find all the legal loopholes. "the community is formed, developed, and reproduced through practices focused on common space.
Legal hacking is the norm actually''. ll When it comes to physical space, one of the most obvious To generalise this principle: the community is developed through commoning, through acts and forms
examples of the reconfiguration of regu lations under the influence of the market is to create legal of organisation oriented towards the production of the common". 13 Thus forming a community is
provisions, norms and architecture to sustain the concept of developing (and privatising) public space another crucial element of the creation of digital commons, but even more important is its development
through public- private partnerships. The decision of the Italian parliament that the privatisation of and resilience. The emerging community was not given something to manage, it created something
services (specifically of water management) is legal and does not obstruct one's access to water as a together, and together devised rules of self-regulation and decision-making.
human right, is another example of a crude manipulation of the law by the state in favour of the The prime example of this principle in the free software community is the Debian Project, formed
market. Unlike legal hacks by corporations that aim to create a favourable legal climate for another around the development of the Debian Linux distribution. It is a volunteer organisation consisting of
round of accumulation through dispossession, Stallman's hack tries to limit the impact of the market around 3,000 developers that since its inception in 1993 has defined a set of basic principles by which
and to create a space of freedom for the creation of a code and of sharable knowledge, by questioning the project and its members conduct their affairs. This includes the introduction of new people into
one of the central pillars of liberal jurisprudence: (intellectual) property law. the community, a process called Debian Social Contract (DSC). A special part of the DSC defines the
Similarly, translated into physical space, one of the initiatives in Europe that comes closest to criteria for "free software': thus regu lating technical aspects of the project and also technical relations
creating a real existing urban commons, Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, is doing the same, "pushing
with the rest of a free software community. The Debian Constitution, another document created by eco-system. Digital commons was the first field in which what Negri and Hardt called the "republic of
the community so it can govern itself, describes the organisational structure for formal decision- property" was challenged. Urban commons, in order to really emerge as a spatialization of a new type
making within the project. of relationship, need to start undoing property as well in order to socially re-appropriate the city. Or
Another example is Wikipedia, where the community that makes the online encyclopedia also in the words of Stavros Stavrides
takes part in creating regulations, with some aspects debated almost endlessly on forums. It is even
possible to detect a loose community of "Internet users" who took to the streets all over the world "the most urgent and promising task, which can oppose the dominant governance model, is the reinven-
when SOPA {Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA {Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity tion of common space. The realm of the common emerges in a constant confrontation with state-
and Theft oflntellectual Property Act) threatened to enclose the Internet, as we know it; the proposed controlled 'authorized' public space. This is an emergence full of contradictions, perhaps, quite difficult
to predict, but nevertheless necessary. Behind a multifarious demand for justice and dignity, new roads
legislation was successfully contested.
to collective emancipation are tested and invented. And, as the Zapatistas say, we can create these roads
Free software projects that represent the core of the digital commons are most of the time born of only while walking. But we have to listen, to observe, and to feel the walking movement. Together".
the initiative of individuals, but their growth and life cycle depend on the fact that they get picked up
by a community or generate community around them that is allowed to take part in their regulation The big task for both digital and urban commons is" [b] uilding a core common infrastructure [which]
and in decisions on what shape and forms the project will take in the future. This is an important is a necessary precondition to allow us to transition away from a society of passive consumers buying
lesson to be transferred to the physical space in which many projects fail because they do not get what a small number of commercial producers are selling. It will allow us to develop into a society in
picked up by the intended community, as the community is not offered a chance to partake in its which all can speak to all, and in which anyone can become an active participant in political, social
creation and, more importantly, its regulation. and cultural discourse''. 17
This core common infrastructure has to be porous enough to include people that are not similar,
Build ing common infrast ruct ure and institution s
to provide "a ground to build a public realm and give opportunities for discussing and negotiating
"The expansion of intellectual property law" as the main vehicle of the trend to enclose the code that what is good for all, rather than the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their
leads to the act of the creation of free software and, thus, digital commons, "is part and parcel of a own commons. Relating commons to groups of "similar" people bears the danger of eventually creating
broader neoliberal trend to privatise what was once under public or under the state's aegis, such as closed communities. People may thus define themselves as commoners by excluding others from their
health provision , water delivery, and military services''. 14 The structural fight headed by the GNU/GPL milieu, from their own privileged commons". 18
against the enclosure of code "defines the contractual relationship that serves to secure the freedom of
If learning carefully from digital commons, urban commons need to be conceptualized on the
means of production and to constitute a community of those participating in the production and
basis of the public, with a self-regulating community that is open for others to join. That socializes
reproduction of free resources. And it is this constitutive character, as an answer to an every time
knowledge and thus produces and reproduces the commons, creating a space for political emancipation
singular situation of appropriation by the capital, that is a genuine political emancipation striving for
15 that is capable of judicial arguments for the protection and extension of regulations that are counter-
an equal and free collective production". Thus digital commons "is based on the communication
16 market oriented.
among singularities and emerges through collaborative social processes of production''.
The most important lesson urban commons can take from its digital counterpart is at the same
time the most difficult one: how to make a structural hack in the moment of the creation of an urban
commons that will enable it to become structurally self-perpetuating, thus creating fertile ground not
only for a singular spatialization of urban commons to appear, but to multiply and create a whole new